CLASS NOTESMay-June 2010

   There's so much news. We live such busy lives. It's so easy to quickly forget that the headline of the moment often has consequences for months and years to come.

Remember the Haitian earthquake? Bob Page will never forget it. As the co-founder of San Francisco-based DPK Consulting, which helps build judicial systems in developing countries, he and two colleagues were in a meeting with local lawyers in Port-au-Prince on January 12. Just before 5 p.m., Bob recalled, there was shaking and roar "like a train coming right through your living room." The building they were in miraculously remained standing. Those on either side did not.

Bob's group made their way through a huge cloud of dust past the chaos of the destroyed city to their hotel, the Montana, which was a pile of concrete slabs. They spent a sleepless night on a lawn near the hotel and, next morning Bob grabbed an ax and in best tradition of a Vermont-bred woodsman began chopping fallen trees in his suit and tie. Later he would help relief workers haul the injured from the hotel rubble on makeshift stretchers made out of hotel doors.

Bob and his team left Haiti when they could by driving to Santo Domingo. "We were not relief workers," Bob explains. "We didn't have the tools or the means to help."

But DPK is back in Haiti now. "We are working hard," Bob reports, "to try to help our counterparts in the courts and the ministry of justice get back on their feet through short term recovery (tents, containers, supplies) and longer-term strategies for the justice system. We shall see, as it was a huge challenge before the earthquake. Now it is almost overwhelming." (To help Haiti, click on the Haiti button on the Dartmouth College homepage.)

Retirement used to mean not doing much of anything. Now it more likely refers to switching what we're doing, maybe making less money and maybe having more fun.

Take Bill Hayden. After 30 years in the Navy - "I can't believe they actually paid me to fly fighter jets off aircraft carriers" - he retired in 1996 as a one-star admiral in charge of all aviation training for the Navy, Marine and Coast Guard. What a job! Bill stayed with what he knew and loved, spending the next 12 years teaching systems, tactics and survival in F-14 and F/A-18 simulators at Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia.

To encourage more American kids to get into engineering Bill founded a nonprofit to fund a science program called STARBASE for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders in a local school system, so they can get an up-close and personal look at science. The program won a statewide award in Virginia.

Send comments on the website to Ben.Day@Dartmouth.org