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Finding yourself in India

2011 WHS graduate determines his life path on Rotary Exchange trip

WORLAND -The Rotary Youth Exchange program, which brings at least two foreign students to Worland High School, helped set up one Worland graduate on his career choice.

Zach Lentsch, who grew up in Worland, went to India for a year following his graduation from Worland High School in 2011, with the Rotary Youth Exchange. He said he studied at Gujarat Ayurvedic University.

Lentsch said he didn't want to take off a year of high school with the Rotary Youth Exchange and thus opted to attend after high school. "Also I didn't want to go to high school somewhere else in the world. I didn't really want to go on an exchange at all, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after high school."

Rotary Exchange students are given choices of where they want to go and Lentsch was fortunate to go to his first choice, India.

"I didn't want to go to Europe. Everyone went to Europe. I wanted to learn a non-European language," he said.

If it hadn't been India, it would have been Turkey, he added.

"I had thought about medicine quite strongly, so that's why I had to lobby pretty hard to get into that university. It's pretty prestigious in that part of the world," he said.

He said initially the university wasn't part of his plan but once he realized he was in the same town as the university he worked to get in.

However, he would not stay on a medical path.

Becoming open minded

He said going to India was "one of hardest things I've ever done. I was very idealistic and very naïve about what it meant to be an open-minded person when I went there. I realized quite quickly that it would be a huge challenge for me, socially and emotionally. I didn't only learn about being an open-minded person but also open hearted person."

He said he learned that the frustrations he had weren't with the culture, people or the place but himself.

"I wasn't going to change anything about India, because India has been a thriving civilization for the past 6,000 years at least. It made me a humbler person. It kind of prepared me for my academic study of anthropology."

He added, "It was an opportunity to get all my personal baggage out of the way and really start to study what was going on politically, socially and culturally in other parts of the world."

Lentsch lived in India for 11.5 months in 2011-2012.

UW studies

When he returned to the United States he attended the University of Wyoming and began studying anthropology.

He said while in India studying medicine, "I wasn't learning very much. There was a lot more going on, especially in that part of India that no one was talking about. There was this massive social change."

He said the city he lived in became the host of the largest oil refinery in the world and he witnessed a mass movement of cotton and sugar cane farmers from rural to urban areas. "It was like overnight, you could see massive social upheaval. I thought learning a more practical skill in addition to learning something about ancient religious text that would be a useful way to learn about India." He said after a year he needed to look at something else and considered sociology and political science "but anthropology seemed to be the best fit."

Living in Yemen

Lentsch said after his freshman year of college he had the opportunity to study abroad in Yemen at the Yemen College of Middle Eastern Studies. He said it brings the foremost scholars of Yemen to teach in the capital, Sanaa.

They offered intensive Arabic classes as well as political science and history of Yemen, anthropology of Yemen. He said most of the classes geared toward native students.

"It was a really dynamic experience. It was right after the Arab Spring (wave of pro-democratic protests, revolutions and civil wars that have swept some Arab nations since 2011)."

Lentsch said Yemen was considered a success with a democratic transition in place. "It was an optimistic time to be there." He said he had been studying Arabic and it greatly improved while there for four months.

He said he had such a great impression there so he looked into his own research project and returned to Yemen in 2014. Planning to be there a year, Lentsch stayed 10 months. "There was a coup so suddenly the research project I was working on, a development project in rural western Yemen, which was really important to the people living around it, suddenly even that wasn't important because there were bigger questions.

Lentsch said there are not many social anthropology students at UW so he worked with different professors at UW and other universities.

"I didn't feel unsafe at all, but the nature of our conversations were no longer productive."

He said the research project he was working on was the after effects of drug removal. A lot of Yemen is still about 70 percent rural-farming based.

"A lot of people grow drug crops because that is the most lucrative source of income. I was looking at a group of Indians who had traced their roots back to Yemen and were wanting to bring the Yemeni part of the community back into the fold."

He said the Indians were spending a lot of money to try to get farmers to grow anything other than a drug crop, including artisan coffee and organic fruits.

"I was looking at the after effects of this project that had been going on for 18 years," he said.

For his own research, in order to do interviews he needed to learn the locals trust and thus worked as a farmhand for about nine months.

"That gave me some insight into what it was like to be farmer of coffee and this drug crop," he said.

Anthropology and visiting the Middle East and Yemen were never part of his thoughts in high school. He said he was interested in the politics of the region because he was a debater.

As for visiting Yemen, "I didn't know anyone from there. I thought it was exotic enough to go someplace like India. But I actually found it a lot of easier to be in the Middle East than in India. People were extremely warm and very hospitable, despite the fact that I was American. I think I was probably treated better because I was an American.

In May, Lentsch graduated from the University of Wyoming with a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology.

This fall Lentsch will head to Harvard University to earn his doctorate in social anthropology.

To get his doctorate, Lentsch said, "In the best of both worlds I would continue to work on the issues related to Yemen The project he has proposed is to continue to work on issues related to Yemen, specifically the relationship between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and why the war that started when he was there is taking place.

"When I was there I was essentially researching the war on drugs, but tha turned into a very literal war that's still ongoing. But it's a not well-understood war in Yemen but especially outside of it."

He said, The project I have proposed is kind of looking at the history of Yemen-Saudi relations and why this war is taking place; the modern history of the war in Yemen. That's the most pertinent issue related to the country right now."

He said due to security concerns he may be unable to do the project.

"I'm interested in the intersections between politics, economy and environment. In the case of Yemen you have the first capital city in the world that has completely run out of ground water. Where I was working people were relying upon rainfall," Lentsch said.

"Also, countries surrounding the Red Sea ... are also hallowed examples of state failure. I'm very interested in sticking to the region because I think the rest of the world, especially the western United States can learn a lot from places that are dealing with extreme water shortages and the political implications of that."

He said it will take seven to eight years to earn his doctorate, which will include at least a year or two of field work.

Once he obtains his doctorate, Lentsch said, he is excited about the possibility of teaching. "Harvard puts a lot of emphasis on training good teachers. But, it's also an interesting place, it's also a feeder school for finance and politics. It will give me an opportunity to take classes and meet people outside my field ... to get a sense whether I would want to go into politics or not. I'm weighing either staying in academia or trying to get involved on the political side of things. I think I'll be focused on that region (Southern Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa), whatever I do."

Perspective on current events

When asked about current events and how living in the Middle East impacts his thoughts, Lentsch said, "I've been to many Middle Eastern countries – Yemen, but also India and South Asia. I would say it's extremely complex. There are some fallback stereotypical narratives that we tell ourselves. For instance, religion is the root of all evil and these people have been killing themselves forever. But in the case of Yemen, it's interesting because most of the conflicts, even today, they are extremely political. They've kind of rebranded themselves."

He added, "I would just say that it's taught me everything is extremely complex. We're very lucky in the United States that we don't experience a lot of political violence. It wasn't always that way. I would say the Middle East, they're kind of the crucible of politics. People wanting to decide how society is organized and power is distributed. The Arab Spring, which was largely the young and secular movement for better government, didn't just go away."

In comparison, Lentsch said, politics in America and in the Middle East are different. "Being in a said political party in that part of world can mean life or death. Here, it just means, what TV channel you watch."