Third World Provides Real-World Education for this Grad

Amanda Dempsey’s UC education took her half-way around the world for experiences that opened the world to her.

The interior design senior in UC’s prestigious College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning worked in both London, England, and Katmandu, Nepal, (as well as in the U.S.) as part of the professional working quarters required for many majors at the university.

The intense and important work she did in Nepal has convinced Dempsey, who graduates June 13, that she needs to return to the Himalayan nation.  Dempsey, a Cleveland native, laughs that her mom wonders where here 23-year-old daughter got such an adventurous spirit.  “My mother wonders how she could have raised a child who wants to go so many places and do so many things…but she’s gotten used to me calling with new, fantastic plans,” said Dempsey.

Right now, Dempsey, with degree in hand from UC’s interior design program which is ranted the nation’s best by professionals in the field, plans to return to Cleveland for a year in order to pursue community service work.  Then, she wants to return to Nepal long-term to pick up again with the work she’s started there.

Dempsey worked for the architecture firm of Sanday Kentro Associates in Katmandu from March through June 2001. “I was on a plane or in airports en route to Nepal for 36 hours.  When I got there, I almost got back on the plane.  I was tired, and it was hot.  The traffic was zooming every which way, dodging animals on the road. Pollution is a serious problem, and the stench was unbelievable,” she recalled But on the day after arriving, Dempsey determinedly showed up for work and was immediately entrusted with projects designed to help the city and its residents.  These included:

• Design analysis to earthquake-proof homes and offices.  Katmandu lies on what is considered the world’s most vulnerable fault line.  Said Dempsey, “An earthquake there would be massive and loss of life would be great because the buildings we analyzed and made retrofit plans for would not hold up even to a minimum earthquake.”  According to Linda Kentro, partner in the firm, Dempsey’s report on the firm’s analysis and recommendations for earthquake-resistant retrofits is a model for the city.

• Analysis of how to best clean up a dangerously polluted river which is endangering human health as well as the local culture.  Explained Dempsey, “Rivers often flow by or through Hindu temples, and there are rituals that at no longer possible because of pollution.  In addition, children play in the rivers and the pollution and stench are so bad.  There’s a real risk of typhoid and other diseases.”  For her part, Dempsey organized the river reclamation surveys and recommendations of the firm for presentation to local leaders.

• Assisting in the design of a tiger-viewing vantage point for a small, environmentally friendly tourist resort.

• Assisting in the design of a women’s and children’s rural health-care center.  According to Dempsey, designing in Nepal presents real challenges because, often as in the case with this health center, funds and services are lacking.  “There was no electricity where this center was.  So, solar panels had to be incorporated for heating.  And you have to be very realistic about what local materials are available for building,” she added.

Dempsey credits UC’s cooperative education program – co-op consists of the practice of alternating paid, professional work with quarters spent in the classroom – for giving her the maturity to take on the challenge of working in Nepal.  “Your first co-op quarter is like going to another country and culture.  I didn’t know anything in my first co-op, but I was forced to function maturely because you work and interact differently in an office than in school.  Because of that, we UC students are so much further ahead when we graduate.  The co-ops really helps us to mature,” she explained.

By the end of her time in Nepal, Dempsey was so involved and excited with her work, with the relationships she built with the people there and the incredible mountain scenery (she once trekked to 14,000 feet) that she actually missed her flight home.  “I got my dates mixed up.  I was supposed to leave on June 10, but I thought that was a Friday.  It wasn’t.  It was the Thursday of that week, and I didn’t realize till that Thursday night that the flight had been that day.”  It would have been a minor matter of a few days’ delay except that that Friday, the country’s royal family was killed by a son in the family.  A mourning period followed in which the entire country basically shut down.  “My family saw all of this on CNN, but I couldn’t call out.  And they thought I was out of Nepal anyway because I should have been if I’d made my flight,” recalled Dempsey.  However, these events made it even harder for her to leave, in an emotional sense.  “I wanted to stay, to be part of the rebuilding of the country,” Dempsey said.  But that’s what she now plans for her future and theirs.