Graduating UC Student Wins Prestigious Fulbright Fellowship

University of Cincinnati June 2008 graduate Mitchell Sipus, 26, has already backpacked through Asia and worked at a refugee camp in Africa. And soon, he’s off to Egypt to study at the American University of Cairo in the Department of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies.

It’s a journey that began when Sipus was an undergraduate fine arts student and won a grant for international travel that allowed him to backpack and hitchhike for four months across Burma, India, Japan and Thailand. What he saw during that time changed the direction of his life.

“I began that trip to study the art of Asia. I finished it wanting to help combat poverty. My personal priorities shifted dramatically,” said Sipus who subsequently enrolled at UC as a dual major pursuing both a master’s degree in the university’s top-ranked architecture program while at the same time pursuing a master’s degree in urban planning, both housed within UC’s internationally recognized College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). 

As an architecture student, Sipus became interested in the topic of temporary settlements. As a planning student focusing on international development, he was interested in informal economies. Those interests – temporary settlements and informal economies – led him last summer to work and conduct thesis research in the Dabaab Refugee Camp, a settlement of close to 190,000 people from Somalia and other parts of the African continent that has existed in Kenya – near the Somali/Kenya border – for almost 20 years.

There, he studied indigenous building and economic patterns, right down to assisting residents to fashion the mud bricks commonly used in local construction. And he gained a few insights to help improve daily life and safety.

“How it is supposed to work in this camp is that the administration contracted by the  United Nations will provide a metal roof, a door and some tools for refugee housing, and a family is supposed to make their own bricks. It’s required that the mud walls of a house be very thick so that the house can withstand heavy rains and flooding. By very thick, I mean that it takes 2,000 or 3,000 mud bricks to construct a house that measures only two or three meters across,” explained Sipus.

However, what happens in practice, according to Sipus, is that the local economy changes the process. Residents who have access to funds, usually from a relative living abroad, will pay others to make the extremely large number of mud bricks required to construct even the smallest shelter because it is very labor intensive.

“People are paid by the brick, about three to five cents per brick, and so, they’re motivated to make as many bricks as possible in a day. Because of that, they’ll make bricks fast, but those quickly made bricks might not be as sound as they could be. That means the entire structure is at risk during the rainy season. The simple act of building a house becomes a complicated issue. This can sometimes create a void between the needs of the refugees and the intentions of the international development agencies… .” he stated.

Sipus worked to bridge such gaps of communication and understanding by not only studying the architecture and economics of camp life but also by actually living, as best he could, within the daily experiences of the refugees. For instance, to experience brick making, he carried water into the Somali desert and attempted to mold loose sand into bricks to start building his own mud house.

He recalled, “None of the refugees had ever seen an international administrator or aide worker, government representative or a white person attempt to do such a job. Yet, it’s the decisions of the administrators, aide workers and government representatives who set up and shape the camp life.”

The disconnect makes for greater hardships related to housing, infrastructure, transportation, sanitation and water delivery. And Sipus reported on these findings in his thesis (in addition to making a report to the camp administration while he was in Africa).

By the end of this coming summer, Sipus will return to Africa, but this time to Cairo, Egypt, to continue his studies regarding refugee issues for one year, thanks to his Fulbright Fellowship.

“Truth be told,” admitted Sipus, “I put the Fulbright application together in just a couple of days. I had asked some professors for recommendations early in the process, but otherwise, I basically did the application five days before the deadline. I had begun taking Arabic classes and was wondering how I could return to Africa. I was trying to think of a way to keep my career going in the same direction. I just thought to go ahead and try for the grant even though I knew there are so few Fulbrights given.”

The best part, for him, is that it represents a return to an urgent sense of purpose because Cairo has a very large refugee population. That means an opportunity to learn more abut the issues facing refugees but in a very different environment and with different populations.

He said, “The most challenging part of my summer in Africa last year was the return to the United States. I loved being in Kenya and the feeling of having an active, hands-on purpose. I wasn’t just preparing for what I wanted to do. I was actually doing it.”

• View Sipus’ travel blog at http://www.nomadicafrica.blogspot.com/
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