Truckload of Shoes Leads to Student’s Ties to UC
His witness of children’s lives in modern-day Iraq led graduate student
Patrick to his education and research opportunities at the University of Cincinnati.
A whole truckload of shoes brought Patrick Duhaney, 25, to the University
of Cincinnati’s graduate planning program.
Those shoes, the truck and Patrick were all in Iraq two years ago where
he was serving as an electrical systems technician after having been called
up to active duty while a reservist pursuing undergraduate history and sociology
courses at Cleveland State University.
He recalls, “The unit went to deliver a large truckload of U.S.-donated
shoes to Iraqi children, many of whom were so poor that they had no shoes.
When we went to deliver the shoes to a village, it became a mob scene. People
stampeded the school where we were distributing the shoes. Older kids and
adults were manhandling small children to get the shoes. We had intended the
effort for good, but it turned out badly.”
Adds Patrick, “I knew there had to be a better way for us to have helped
that village with our shoe-aid effort.”
It was to find that better way that Patrick came to UC’s top-ranked
graduate planning program, housed within the internationally ranked College
of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.
“
It’s my new mission,” says this military veteran, and it’s
one where he has a lot of support. “When I first called UC’s planning
program to explore the graduate program, the office staff and director all
had a number of telephone conversations with me. They all made time for me.
They treated me like an individual. They treated me great, and almost immediately,
I had a personal connection with the university because of them.”
Shortly after his acceptance into the program, Patrick received a personal
phone call with great news: He was named a recipient of an Albert C. Yates
Scholarship, which meant he would work in close partnership with a senior
researcher. In this case, with internationally respected housing expert David
Varady, winner of UC’s 2008 Rieveschl Award for Creative and Scholarly
Work, whose research has been published in six books and ten times as many
journals all over the world. The Yates Scholarship also meant a monthly stipend
and tuition remission.
That was great news all the way around except for one thing, jokes Patrick: “Professor
Varady did not wait until the start of the school year to contact me. He called
me in the summer before I even started in the program. His mentorship began
from about minute one after I received the Yates Scholarship. He gave me materials
to read and ‘homework’ assignments right away.”
In the year since, Patrick has worked closely with Varady and also with
Xinhao Wang, professor of planning. In that time, Patrick has become something
of an ace with GIS systems used to analyze economic, community, natural resources
and other data important to planners, and he’s also learned a lot about
how communities work.
That’s because Varady’s international specialty is housing, including
issues related to rental housing, subsidized housing, home owners and discrimination.
Now, Varady is guiding Patrick in a thesis project related to how landlords
and renters can work to integrate themselves into communities.
This collaborative work is helping Patrick to find better ways to help
communities. For instance, if today Patrick hoped to help a community by delivering
a truckload of shoes to local children, he knows just how he would do it.
“
Looking back at that incident in Iraq, we didn’t know how that community
organized itself. Now I know that I’d work more slowly through community
structures already in place, most likely a local governing body or person
or the social network,” he states, adding, “With any community-improvement
project – be it providing shoes to children or working with landlords
and their renters – you’ve got to work to empower people and structures
that are in that place. You cannot just drive up with a whole truckload of
shoes. You have to work slowly and take the time to build trust.”
Such trust is just what Patrick has earned in the year’s worth of research
projects he’s collaborated on with Varady and Wang. The senior researcher
(Varady) has credited Patrick’s ongoing assistance with projects in
papers to be published nationally. And importantly, Patrick recalls being
asked to take over some of Varady’s classes for a short stint. States
Patrick, “That meant a lot to me because his students mean a lot to
Professor Varady. He would never have asked me to teach in his place if he
didn’t trust the work I would do.”
All in all, his graduate research and classes at UC remind Patrick of his
years in the military. He explains, “In the army, they break you down
and rebuild you better. It’s the same here. My mentors are breaking
down my uncritical manner of thinking. They’re rebuilding me to think
systematically…analytically regarding urban issues, to study and listen
to a community before suggesting the what and how of any changes and then
to capture measurable improvements over time.”
This is, indeed, the better way he set out to learn when in Iraq.
