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WEEK of OCTOBER 20, 2003
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Globetrotter

by Jeffrey Stanley

New Upper School English teacher Jennie Tranel is no bookish schoolmarm. She spent this summer biking 600 miles to the Canadian Rockies, just for kicks. And in looking over her teaching bio, the word Cambodia leaps out, and seems like a wild card in an otherwise tame academic history.

In Cambodia, what started as a holiday between teaching gigs soon turned into an eye-opening experience in another culture. “I started volunteering,” explains Tranel, “and then I got a job at the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center, a nongovernmental organization that runs a shelter for victims of domestic violence, rape and sex trafficking—all huge problems in Southeast Asia generally and in Cambodia especially. They have a vocational training program, which means the women learn to sew and weave and then go work in the garment factories for $40 a month—sweatshops to us but one of the only viable economic opportunities for most of them. I was training the staff in things like report writing, grant writing, documentation of cases.”

Given her passion for teaching writing and language, Tranel can’t help but describe her challenges there by making literary references. “People who go there with the best intentions of ‘helping’ the locals can easily get sucked into a kind of colonial life—having a maid, a cook, a driver, never mixing with locals at all—in many ways colonial situations haven’t changed much since people like E.M. Forester and Graham Greene wrote about them.” She was particularly disturbed by the poverty in rural areas, which she describes as “staggering.”

Her experience was not without personal rewards, especially the friends she made, and one in particular, Chanthol Oung. “She was the director of the organization I worked for and one of the most selfless, inspirational people I’ve ever known. She’s a genocide survivor, lost a bunch of her family during the Khmer Rouge period, was educated in the Thai refugee camps, and founded this organization when she was 30. She’s gone on to make a huge success of the organization in Cambodia. Among other things, Oung speaks all over the world on women’s rights and has helped draft a domestic violence law in Cambodia. More than anything, she’s an incredibly loving and peaceful person—she has a serenity that few people seem to achieve in their lives.”

Tranel says she tried her best to assimilate by learning the language and getting to know people. “But no matter what I could never blend in. Talk about disparities—I’m probably the tallest woman most Cambodians have ever seen and they would shamelessly point at me and whisper ‘kapuah’ (meaning tall) to each other, giggle and follow me around.”

Cambodia isn’t the only place where Tranel, 6'1", has been noticed for her height. She grew up in Montana, where people take high school girls’ basketball really seriously, she says. “Along with a couple of teammates I achieved celebrity status in high school, to our dismay when we tried to get into bars and the bouncers recognized us from our pictures in the paper.” To this day, she maintains that celebrity status in her hometown. “I still run into people at parties and the post office who say, ‘You’re Jennie Tranel—you were on that incredible undefeated team—I came to all your games.’ I’m always pretty amazed by that. It’s all blown way out of proportion.” She played a bit of basketball in college but a knee injury during freshman year forced an early retirement.

Today Tranel lives in Harlem, but says life in Manhattan isn’t so different from life on a Montana cattle ranch. “Actually, New York City and Montana ranches are a lot alike—they’re both wild and you have to figure out how to take care of yourself.”

She says that after her experience in Cambodia, “I thought I wanted to pursue a career in human rights, but after three years out of teaching I found I missed it a lot and didn’t really want to go to law school, which I would have needed to do if I wanted to get serious about human rights.” Instead she sought out Brooklyn Friends. “I always wanted to teach in a Quaker school,” she says.

When Tranel isn’t teaching or saving the world, she burns off steam on those long-distance cycling trips. This summer she and a friend spent 11 days biking from Glacier, Montana to Jasper, Canada. “The Canadian Rockies are phenomenally beautiful,” she says, adding wryly, “The Canadians are really friendly, eh?”

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