The lecture hall in Emerson was full of people shuffling fellowship schedules and recommendation forms. the advisor was at the lectern, telling us about travelling fellowships and the awards given last year. One person had gone to a village in Greece, another was looking at playgrounds in northern Europe. She was taking questions. How many recommendations do you need? How long are the essays? Who nominates you? Near the back, a dark haired guy in a t-shirt and black boots raised his hand.

"Do the fellowships," he asked, "permit travel into violent Third World Countries?"

There was a pause.

"Where do you want to go ?"

"Occupied Kurdistan. I'm interested in the Kurdish refugee camps."

"Um, well, no they don't, um, like sending people into dangerous areas. Parents don't like it if we help their kids get killed." A nervous laugh.

The dark-haired guy went quietly back to his notebook. Around him you could see a little ripple of embarrassment fan through the room, people's cotton-candy concerns about deadlines and format policies going damp in their mouths.

That was the first time I saw Mark F. Pettigrew '89-'90.

Pettigrew once started a short story with the title "Under the Big Sky." It was to be "an end of the world sort of thing." An anthropologist was going to be out in the desert somewhere, studying an obscure nomad tribe, when the rest of the world was destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. Suddenly these people living on the margins of the world, ignored by humanity, were propelled onto center stage--they were the only humans left, and the anthropologist's view of them changed completely.

"The idea--besides obvious messages about how they have respect for the land and that chemical and nuclear weapons do not--was that though the anthropologist sees them as so much more important, the nomads don't feel any different. Only we saw them as marginal; their world has always been important and real to them."

"I never finished the story," he laughs, "I can't write fiction worth a damn."

"But what I'm interested in are things people haven't heard about. That's where a contribution can be made."

Mark wants to make his contribution through photography.

"One of my feelings about photography is that, while I don't think it can change the world, sometimes it can make things exist for people in the West that don't exist otherwise."

Every night for a few months this spring, in the backyard of 36 Irving St., Where I met Mark for the second time, as a roommate, you would hear the pop of a Sterno can and soon coal light would be flickering against the back windows. Occasionally there would be the spiralling wails of Arabic music. Inside, a tea kettle would be boiling mark was preparing to smoke.