Curio Cabinet

Why settle for one valedictorian when your high school could have nine? Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas recently made Houston Independent School District history with a graduating class that included nine valedictorians, all of whom had better-than-perfect 5.0 GPAs. The hardworking seniors, Alkiviades Boukas, Daniel Chen, Evie Tseng-Ying Kao, Angela Ling, Miles Mackenzie, Wenson Tsiah-Hao Tang, Christopher Zhou, and twin sisters Annie and Shirley Zhu, have even been interviewed by major news stations and Good Morning America.
 

In HISD, students can achieve a GPA higher than 4.0, known as a “weighted” GPA, by taking difficult courses, such as dual credit or AP courses. However, 5.0 GPAs are rare–let alone nine of them at once! The valedictorians' achievement is also particularly impressive given that they had to complete much of their coursework via distance-learning, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. That includes group projects, which took hours of collaboration with fellow classmates via video calls.
 

In an interview with CBS News, Bellaire High School principal Michael McDonough explained that, although he knew that the class of 2021 was academically impressive, he was still shocked to have so many valedictorians. “I began to consider the idea of two to three valedictorians, but I never imagined nine. These students are also involved in after-school activities and leaders in various organizations. To juggle their schoolwork and extracurriculars, then throw in a pandemic and virtual learning, and still maintain a 5.0 GPA—it is nothing short of amazing. I could not be prouder of them,” he said. Despite their identical GPAs, the Bellaire valedictorians are planning to attend a variety of universities, from the University of Texas to Stanford University, and major in an array of topics. Among these are: business, physics, biology, engineering and symbolic systems. Who knows what impact these bright young minds may have on the future of their fields!

 
[Image description: Nine individual photos, on a black background, of the nine valedictorians from Bellaire High School.] Credit & copyright: HISD

 
Written by: Maria C.

You don't earn the nickname "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World" without ruffling a few feathers. The Egyptian feminist and physician, Nawal El Saadawi, passed away last month. She was a deeply controversial figure at home, and while her political detractors made violent attempts to silence her, she nonetheless left behind a staggering legacy of feminist and anti-imperialist activism and literature.
 

Nawal El Saadawi was born on October 27, 1931 in the town of Kafr Tahla, Egypt. Her father Al-Sayed El Saadawi was a government official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education who was exiled for protesting against British rule. He was considered fairly progressive and encouraged his daughter to pursue an education. Nawal El Saadawi's intellectual independence clashed with many of the cultural expectations put upon her gender: at the age of six, she was abducted at night by people she knew, and forced to undergo a female genital mutilation ritual (FGM). At age 10, she was arranged to be married, though she avoided it through her protestations and mother's support. When her parents passed away, she was left with the burden of providing for her six younger siblings—even as her grandmother made snide remarks like "a boy is worth 15 girls at least... Girls are a blight."
 

In spite of her difficult upbringing, El Saadawi managed to graduate from medical school at Cairo University in 1955. Her work as a doctor took her to rural villages where she advocated for sanitary medical practices and the mental and physical health of poor women. She was eventually shunned from the villages for speaking out against domestic violence and FGM, and her critics would claim she “incited women to rebel against the divine laws of Islam." Her work as a physician was so highly regarded that she eventually became the Minister of Public Health to the Egyptian Medical Association, and would found the Association for Health Education.
 

After the publication of her work Women and Sex in 1969, El Saadawi was removed from her government post and her magazine Health was banned by President Anwar Sadat's regime. In the 70s, she dedicated herself to researching neurosis in women at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and in 1979 would helm the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa and the Middle East. By that time, El Saadawi was a prime target of Sadat's regime. She was arrested in 1981 as a liberal conspirator—which was untrue, though she did publish a feminist magazine called Confrontation which must have equally irritated Sadat. While in Qanater Women's Prison she was denied writing utensils, and so began writing her Memoirs from the Women's Prison using toilet paper and a black eyebrow pencil.
 

After Sadat's death, El Saadawi was released from prison and experienced a decade of less hostility towards her work in Egypt. In 1982, she founded the Arab Women Solidarity Association. The relative peace did not last: in 1993, under the threat from Islamists extremists, she was forced to flee Egypt and took a position in Duke University's Asian and African Languages Department. While in the U.S., El Saadawi did not back down from criticizing the U.S. and its use of imperialistic war powers abroad, and propaganda to stoke Islamophobia at home. Even when she was able to return home to Egypt in 1996, El Saadawi continued to speak her truth in the face of opposition. In 2008, she successfully fought an attempt to ban her writings and strip her of her nationality because of the controversy surrounding her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting. In her old age, she established the first Egyptian chapter of the Global Solidarity for Secular Society, citing a need for Egypt to divorce itself from Islam as the state's official religion.
 

In tribute to Nawal El Saadawi, the Egyptian-American journalist Mona Elthahawy recalled the first time she saw an interview with El Saadawi. When told she was a "savage and dangerous woman," El Saadawi replied, "I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous." She may not have swung swords or collected firepower, but Nawal El Saadawi frightened regimes by wielding truths that could topple their oppressive empires.
 

[Image description: Egyptian activist Nawal El Saadawi sits in front of bookcases, smiling with her white hair in a braided bun. ] Credit & copyright: The Economist

 
Written by: Esther P.

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

If you’ve seen the Lord of the Rings movies, you know New Zealand’s natural beauty is in a category of its own. It’s also in a legal category of its own. In 2014, New Zealand congress passed a law granting Te Urewera National Park “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” That’s right: in New Zealand, land can be a person! And since Te Urewera National Park can’t complain if its human rights are being violated, the New Zealand government then created a board of trustees to speak on its behalf. The Te Urewera Act is a compromise between New Zealanders of European ancestry and the country’s indigenous Māori people. For the Māori, land is an extension of the people who historically lived on it. Thus, the original establishment of national parks like Te Urewera was not seen by them as a positive thing. It made large swaths of land property of the national government, and therefore subject to the needs and interests of outsiders and corporations. The Te Urewera Act addressed this by the making the National Park a “person” and then transferring stewardship of that person from the government to a board of trustees, half of whom must be Māori. The government plans to grant the same sort of personhood to Whanganui River soon. Don’t worry, the public will still be able to visit these newly protected lands, er people. By the way, the US Supreme Court used similar legal gymnastics in 2010. They declared corporations were people in the Citizens United case, in order to give them the right to spend money as they wish in political campaigns. Actually, it’s hard to think of a better way to illustrate the difference between the two countries.
 

Image credit & copyright: Blobs of Consciousness
 

If only shopping didn’t cost so much! Strange as it may seem, one small space in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood actually allows customers to shop for free. The H.K. Free Store is located at 45th Street, just west of 9th Avenue, on the outer wall of a space once occupied by Justin Timberlake’s Southern Hospitality restaurant. It’s the brainchild of community organizers Chana Widawski and Bailey Sperling. The idea is simple: allow people to take small, useful items they need, such as toiletries, and in return ask that they leave behind something equally useful, such as a book or an unused face mask, provided they are able to.
 

The store was devised not just as a way to help those struggling during the pandemic, but to help the environment. “We have so many folks right now in this neighborhood and neighborhoods across the city that are without work and people without roofs over their heads. Things like toothpaste is just an expense more than sometimes people can afford right now,” Widawski explained, in an interview with New York 1. Sperling added, “We all have so many things and there are so many resources that are put into making new things all the time when there is perfectly good stuff in people's houses they just want to get rid of. All the stuff here would have otherwise gone to a landfill.” The store operates entirely on the “honor system”, and has no full-time employees to monitor how much is being taken. Instead, a team of over 50 volunteers pass by the store a few times a day, to check in. They also make sure that the store is stocked with proper items, such as soap and toothpaste, rather than items it can’t accommodate, such as food. “We have a very small space here, things like clothes and food take up a lot of space and are really hard to manage. Without a full time staffer we cannot manage food, and clothes, textiles, furniture and other big stuff,” Sperling explained. The free store may be pint-sized, but the dream behind it–of neighbors helping neighbors and communities helping the environment–is truly as big as it gets.

 
[Image description: a pedestrian walks past the small storefront of the Hell’s Kitchen Free Store, which contains a shelf of books and other items. ] Credit & copyright: W42ST

 
Written by: Maria C.

Could poop be a major new renewable energy source? That's what a prison in Malawi is betting on. At Mulanje Prison, inmates were used to starting the day early to prepare 70 cubic feet of firewood for the day's meals. The arduous task was completed daily until a biogas digester was installed on the premises by United Purpose, a charity devoted to sustainability in underdeveloped countries. The biogas digester is a system that converts human waste into energy. The one at Mulanje Prison is made from plastic sheets with an inlet that feeds the waste into the digester where it's submerged into water. The water helps create an anaerobic environment (oxygen-free) where bacteria can break down the biomass into methane gas and a fertilizer byproduct. The odorless methane is then pumped out to the piping systems in the kitchen where it is used in the prison's gas stoves.
 

Inmates and workers were initially skeptical of the device, fearing there would be sewage leakage or bad smells accompanying their meals. In addition to the labor saved by the biogas digester, the prison is also saving about $400 a month on firewood and electricity bills. On top of that, the slurry byproduct is being used to boost vegetable growth in the farm at the prison, which may help reduce malnutrition issues among inmates, including those living with HIV. Similar systems have been installed at two other prisons in Malawi, though addressing smaller scale home use of biogas digesters, which would also process food waste, are still in the trial phase. United Purpose is hoping that the increased use of the biogas digesters in Malawi may address the country's need for firewood as fuel sources, which has led to deforestation of about 1.2 million acres of natural forest from 1990 to 2020 in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. If the biomass digester catches on, we could see a worldwide revolution in energy usage transformed by the power of poop!

 
[Image description: Prison inmates in Malawi construct an underground biomass digester] Credit & copyright: Strathclyde Energy for Development

 
Written by: Esther P.