American Ambassadors
Translating U.S. Culture for International Students
By Susannah Felts
 |
UAB's International Mentoring Program pairs international students such as Hwasoon Kim and Michael Gottwald (left) with student mentors such as Chinazor Iwuaba and Nathan Hadley (right). |
Every August, more than 200 international students arrive on UAB’s campus from all corners of the globe. Numerous challenges and adventures await them, from mastering Birmingham’s bus system to the first bites of Southern-style barbecue. But each of these students can tap into an experienced local guide as he or she becomes acclimated to a new culture: a volunteer from UAB’s International Mentoring Program.
Founded in 1997 and run as a joint initiative of Student Life and International Scholar and Student Services, the program accepts 14 students to be trained as mentors each fall. It was designed in response to a clear need, explains director Lura Foreman: An international student who was unhappy at UAB decided to leave the university, and in doing so wrote a letter suggesting that a mentoring program might help future students have a better experience.
Hands Across the Americas
Reaching Out to Guatemalan Women
By Jo Lynn Orr
 |
After seeing the needs of Guatemalan women firsthand as a graduate student, Nancee Neel helped start an organization to support women and girls through education, health care, and community building. Photo courtesy Rebecca Daubert |
The first time Nancee Neel visited Guatemala, she sensed an immediate connection. “I felt I had come home,” she recalls. It wasn’t the country’s breathtaking landscape of soaring mountains, lush cloud forests, and dazzling coastlines that drew her in; it was the people. “They are just amazing,” she says, “so loving and warm.”
Neel, an alumna of the UAB School of Public Health and former assistant professor in the school’s Department of Maternal and Child Health, first traveled to Guatemala in 1987 with David Coombs, Ph.D. (now professor emeritus of health behavior), to research her thesis for a master’s degree in public health. She returned the next year, and lived in Guatemala for six months while collecting information for her doctoral dissertation. Since then, she has gone back many times to learn more about the country’s culture, visit with friends, and make new ones.
Stepping Up
Seeking a way to improve the lives and health of Guatemalan women living in rural areas, Neel began informally working with a local cooperative called Pop Atz’iaq in 2004. She helped establish a microcredit fund for women and an educational scholarship program for girls. Then in 2006, she and some friends in Birmingham started Threads Weaving Dreams, a nonprofit organization that provides resources and support to Guatemalan women and their families through education, health care, and community building.
The Threads group also works with a clinic called Primeros Pasos, which has established the Stairway to Good Health (Escalera a Una Buena Salud) program to improve the health of women through nutrition education and other health-promotion efforts. Another Stairway goal is to improve participating women’s self-esteem and leadership qualities, and to foster community participation and awareness of gender and identity.
“It is an amazing three-year program,” Neel says. “The first year targets health education, including preventive measures and how to recognize different kinds of illnesses, as well as issues that arise at the family and community levels. They really educate the women, many of whom never had the opportunity to attend school. The second year is about empowerment—self-esteem, gender issues, participation in the political process—issues that the women have never had formal instruction in.”
The Hits Just Keep on Coming
UAB Alumnus Is Viral Video Star
By Caperton Gillett
 |
Brian Curtin (center) parlayed sink faucets, a UAB parking deck, and hundreds of hours of editing time into a smash hit YouTube film called Concrete Hustle. Now the UAB graduate and a cast and crew of fellow alums are back with a new viral phenomenon: Beyond Black Mesa. Click photo above to see a larger version. |
A few million people have seen Brian Curtin get his comeuppance in a UAB parking deck. He hopes that even more will tune in online to watch him get attacked by alien robots outside a Birmingham warehouse.
Bad things have been happening to this UAB graphic design graduate ever since he began making “stupid little short films” (his words) in high school using the video function on his still camera. He kept on making those films—with progressively advancing equipment and techniques—while he was at UAB, but it wasn’t until after he graduated in 2007 that Curtin found his cinematic calling.
Laser Blazer
As an art director at the Birmingham ad agency Big Communications, Curtin got plenty of experience using film-editing software—experience that spilled over into his own personal projects after work and on the weekends. Inspired by a raft of Star Wars-themed fan videos on YouTube, Curtin and some friends (including fellow UAB alumni Matt Hall and Mat Powell) decided they could make their own sci-fi movie, and make it better.
Following three months of elaborate choreography (it helped that he and another actor were “moderate breakdancers back in the day,” Curtin says), a month of shooting at a parking deck on UAB’s campus (first surreptitiously, later with an official permit), and six to eight months of post-production work on his computer, Curtin unleashed Concrete Hustle on the world.
The nearly four-and-a-half-minute film—a raging lightsaber battle involving three combatants, backflips, flying leaps, several stab wounds, and an apparent high-altitude fall off the parking deck—is a monument to non-stop action. And even though Concrete Hustle has no dialogue, it certainly spoke to its audience: As of November 1, it has been viewed more than 2.7 million times.
Brian Curtin returns to the parking deck to talk about his first million views, the enduring power of lightsabers, and the prospects of a Concrete Hustle 2 in this video. Story continues below video.
