“As we wandered together, Josh reminded us who we were and what we could be” ~ Leah Katzelnick

On July 31, 2009, I had stumbled into a small Internet café in Managua, Nicaragua to read tidings from the United States.  My inbox was flooded with the news that my mentor, teacher, and dear friend Josh Fattal, as well as Sarah Shourd and Shane Bauer, had been taken into custody by the Iranian authorities.  I circled around the block on that bright morning and cried with frustration on the curb. A blossoming tree embraced me with its laden branches; Josh’s imprisonment could not have seemed more strange and distant in that moment.

IHP is built on the principle of uprooting its students, casting them adrift in the magnificent, edifying school of the world.  Our books were conversations, our classrooms villages and non-profits.  Everyone we met was our teacher.   In the midst of continuous change, Josh was a focus of stability, a pivot point in our transformative journey.  He was there to make us laugh, to lead us on to the next adventure, and always to reflect with us.  When our minds were unmoored he philosophized us into the docks of heightened awareness, when we were lonely he culled from within us memories that revived our wearied souls.   As we wandered together, Josh reminded us who we were and what we could be, connecting our seemingly lost and our realized selves.

I have wandered a great deal since our journey together.  I passed my summer after the International Honors Program to India, China and South Africa in Nicaragua; devoted my last year at university exploring what I had learned of NGOs and volunteering during my travels on IHP and in Nicaragua; spent a summer studying Dengue Fever in a lab in North Carolina; and passed the next year pursuing a Masters in Public Health in England.  Not only did Josh help guide me towards this path, but his imprint on my thought process allows me to re-equilibrate as environment and ideas whirl around me in endless flurry. Yet, while I have migrated, he has been confined and restricted.   In a dulled environment, he is deprived of that world of change, the world that moves and inspires and nurtures.  His sustenance is memories and the few shreds of correspondence that reach his dank cell.

What Josh always provided us with was comfort amidst the strangeness of change, grounding and familiarity within the foreign.  Josh, the most positive, optimistic, vibrant person I have ever met, is certain to search for this home within the foreign, comfort despite suffering.  I cannot possibly imagine the courage this requires.  We hope our fast and love for Josh will stir the unmoving, embrace him with the familiar, and sustain in him, and the world, a vision of freedom. We hope to act as a stimulus to bring him home.

~ Leah Katzelnick

IHP Health and Community, ’09