By ADAM GRYBOWSKI Staff Writer
Jordan Kaplan had a plan. Before going to medical school, he wanted to work for a year in a lab, conducting research and gaining experience. But job offers were scarce, so this summer Mr. Kaplan began exploring other options, finally landing on the opportunity to volunteer at Villa La Paz, a medical clinic 30 miles from the capital of Peru.
“I wanted to start volunteering right away,” he says.
To start saving money, he resumed working full-time at Princeton Borough’s Small World Coffee, where he has worked as a barista intermittently since he was a student at The College of New Jersey. He graduated in 2006 with a biology degree.
Mr. Kaplan, 24, has organized a variety show fundraiser to help him complete the cost of his travel expenses and inoculations. Any additional money raised will benefit the Villa La Paz Foundation.
The show will take place at Small World Coffee on Wednesday (Oct, 22) at 7:30 p.m. Mr. Kaplan’s own band will perform, along with other baristas who will leave the counter to offer their musical, comedic and dance talents.
“You will see bunch of different faces from the café,” Mr. Kaplan says. “I’ve always known that everyone at Small World is supportive, but they’ve helped me out in so many ways. It’s been amazing.”
Not two weeks after the show, Mr. Kaplan hopes to be on his way to Villa La Paz. The clinic treats sick children from families too poor to buy the necessary medicine or treatment. The children who are admitted suffer most often from chronic diarrhea, malnutrition, tuberculosis and chronic respiratory disease. Villa La Paz provides patients with food, medicine and a home to recover in, free of charge.
The clinic’s founder is also its director. In 1983 Dr. Anthony Lazzara left his academic position at Emory University in Atlanta to devote his life to working for the poor. Mr. Kaplan was inspired to volunteer at the clinic after discovering it through “The Patients of a Saint,” a documentary film about Dr. Lazzara.
Mr. Kaplan’s interest in humanitarian work is the result of a shift that began in college. “My interest (in medicine) used to be science- based,” he says. And though science is still important to him, he has been reassessing his goals. He completed the MCATs but didn’t apply to medical school right out of college. Since graduating he has worked, traveled and completed training to be a certified New Jersey EMT-Basic.
His ultimate goal is to work in international health, working in clinics around the world. “I want to get outside the country and help people,” he says, adding that his education, EMT training and travel experience (he’s been to 21 countries) would make him valuable in a foreign country.
While volunteering at the Villa La Paz Mr. Kaplan will be provided with housing and food. He’ll help with basic tasks, helping children recover and teaching them skills to help them re-enter society. He plans to stay one month. Upon returning his goal is to re-take the MCATs and apply to medical school. He’s considering deferring for one year to teach English in Japan and gain more experience abroad.
Mr. Kaplan believes there are many people in the area who would like to volunteer but are unable to because of the responsibilities of work and family. “I figure if there are these people out there, they can help out through me,” he says.
Jordan Kaplan’s variety show fundraiser will be held at Small World Coffee, 14 Witherspoon St., Princeton, on Wednesday (Oct. 22) at 7:30 p.m. To donate directly, visit http:/ /jordantoperu.artistassembly.com
Mercy’ with Morrison by Brian No Special Writer
Nobel Prize-winning novelist and retired Princeton University professor Toni Morrison treated the community to a sneak peek of her latest novel, “A Mercy,” to a packed Richardson Auditorium on Oct. 14.
Welcomed to the stage with a standing ovation, Ms. Morrison read passages from her ninth novel, which will be published in November. Ms. Morrison, 77, is best known for her 1987 novel “Beloved,” the story of a runaway slave who kills her infant daughter so that her child doesn’t live to become a slave.
Ms. Morrison’s latest work, “A Mercy,” is set in 1680s America and follows the life of a slave girl, Florens, who is sold to an Anglo- Dutch trader by her mother to settle a debt and to give the daughter a better life.
“A Mercy” differs from Ms. Morrison’s past work, which often deals with the scars of slavery and racism and the plight and heroism of African-American women. The new novel takes place before the slave trade was in full swing and before slavery became an American institution. In that sense, Ms. Morrison said, “A Mercy” is less about race than it is about slavery and servitude.
“I was sort of interested in what it would be like to have slavery without race. How would that be?” she said before she began her reading. “I know as you do that it’s not something we’re born with — the idea of superiority that is racial.”
Ms. Morrison pointed out that every great civilization in history had been built using slave labor, but America was unique because slavery was viewed exclusively through race.
“So it wasn’t slavery that was different, but somehow here it became different,” she said. “And how that plays into the residue of racism was interesting to me.”
The book’s narrative is shaped by Florens’ abandonment and her mother’s act of “mercy” by giving her up.
“ ‘I saw the tall man see you as a human child,’” Morrison said, reading the mother’s words aloud in a soft, slightly raspy voice behind a large lectern. “‘I knelt before him hoping for a miracle. He said yes. It was a mercy offered by a human.’”
Ms. Morrison uses her trademark prose — emotional, flowing, and vivid — to follow Florens’ journey through the eyes of three people: Florens herself, her fellow servant and mother figure, Lina, and Florens’ mother.
Gideon Rosen, chair of the university’s Humanities Council, noted in his introduction that the reading was something of a bookend to Ms. Morrison’s time at Princeton.
On Valentine’s Day 1989, when she first arrived at Princeton, Ms. Morrison did a reading from her most recent novel, “Beloved,” which had won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Four years later, Ms. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, catapulting her into literary pantheon. Ms. Morrison taught creative writing at the university and retired from teaching, and was awarded emerita status, in 2006.
Professor Rosen hailed Ms. Morrison’s achievements and contributions to American literature. “Now as much as ever, we live in Toni Morrison’s America,” he said.
She was recently in the spotlight when she endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama, her first public presidential endorsement, and wrote him an open letter.
“Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities,” she wrote in January. “Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.”
The reading of “A Mercy” attracted a large, diverse crowd from the Princeton area. Audience members lavished praise afterward and remarked on the power of Ms. Morrison’s writing.
“It was a magical moment, brother. A magical moment by a masterful artist,” Professor Cornel West said.
“She draws you in so that you’re waiting for each word,” Susan Hockaday of Hopewell said. “What she tells you, though, is beautiful and terrifying at the same time.”
University of Pennsylvania Professor Thadious Davis said, “It was so moving. I don’t understand how she ever gets to those places that are so deeply recessed into our consciousness.”

