From Summer 2012 URI Alumni Magazine Quadangles.
Talent Development Students Mecca Smith and Mallory Stedman are featured in an article about the Alternative Spring Break sponsored by the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies.
Mallory Stedman carefully packed a medicine bag with a sacred feather when she traveled to Nepal this March.
The bag, blessed by the Narragansett tribe’s medicine man, contained cultural gifts from the tribe to give new friends—a kernel of corn to represent a source of nourishment, a seashell from Narragansett beach representing the tribe’s homelands. Then as is tradition, Stedman incorporated her own gift, choosing a glass peace sign in honor of her tribe.
“But none of the gifts compare to the gift that the trip in itself was. I will never forget my time in Nepal and the amazing, kind spirit of the Nepali people,” says Stedman, who majored in anthropology and is completing minors in the cultural aspects of textiles and in nonviolence and peace studies.