 
| Regina Lowy Espenshade ’64 is an international peacekeeper who travels the world overseeing elections. | |||||
Making a DifferenceBy Jill Connors Regina Lowy Espenshade was born to Jewish immigrant parents who lost everything when they fled Austria before World War II. A 1964 political science graduate, Espenshade has gone from a tenement in the Olneyville section of Providence to a position as an international peacekeeper who travels the world overseeing elections. Although she has called Washington, D.C., home for many years now, Espenshade has not lost her sense of who she is and where she came from. The memories are too vivid. Espenshade’s parents were Jewish shopkeepers in a small Austrian town when a Nazi edict stripped them of their property in 1938 and forced them to leave. They arrived in New York City the following year with their older daughter. They spoke no English and had no contacts. Told there were factory jobs in Providence, they headed north. Espenshade’s father found work in a shipyard factory, her mother as a cleaning woman at Rhode Island Hospital. Espenshade was born in Providence in 1943. When she was nine, her family moved to a public housing project near Olneyville, accommodations they considered “a luxury.” Espenshade credits an “incredible support network” in South Providence of public-school teachers and volunteers at the Nickerson Settlement House with nurturing her from nursery school through high school and instilling the confidence that enabled her to shine as a student. But her greatest inspiration was her parents, whose struggles never defeated them. “They were tired, frustrated, and didn’t know the language,” says Espenshade, “yet somehow they gave me the feeling that if there was anything I wanted, I could have it.” Fast forward to October 2003. The scene is a rural area of Azerbaijan where Espenshade is part of a team of observers assigned to monitor a supposedly democratic election in this once-Communist country. In spite of such techniques as transparent ballot boxes and vote-count results recorded under supervision, at the end of the day former Communist Party officials retain their positions and the opposition starts a riot, claiming the election was stolen. Espenshade and her team leave the country, discouraged yet hopeful that after enough supervised elections, Azerbaijan will one day achieve true democratic elections. “Ever since I was a student, I’ve been a person who is an idealist,” says Espenshade. Never shy about expressing those ideals, Espenshade calls herself a “troublemaker.” As an undergraduate she spoke up as a member of the debate team, as a member of student groups protesting the Vietnam War, and as an intern in Washington, D.C., during the summers of 1961, 1962, and 1963. “I was there in August 1963 for the Civil Rights March when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous speech,” recalls Espenshade. “I took JFK’s call to action to ‘ask not what your country can do for you...”’ to heart. I was all fired up, not at all cynical. Those were heady times in Washington.” Having written her senior thesis on the politics involved in the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Espenshade moved to Washington, D.C., after graduation to work for the newly formed HUD. There, at age 21, she found her ideas—based in part on her experiences growing up in public housing—incorporated into public policy. “There were extraordinary opportunities for me at that time,” says Espenshade, who describes her first eight years at HUD working on anti-poverty programs, as “meteoric.” In the late 1970s, still with HUD, Espenshade turned her attention to urban redevelopment, working on the revival of Times Square in New York City as well as projects in other cities. Weary of the Washington scene by the late 1980s, she pushed to be sent to Israel where she worked on the redevelopment of Jerusalem, learning Hebrew and making friends and contacts throughout the city. Those contacts were key in 1993 when, back in Washington, she helped form a task force of Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians to build housing in the West Bank and Gaza following the Oslo Peace Accords. In 1994, Espenshade left HUD and went back to school. She studied Middle Eastern politics, learned Arabic, and in 1996 earned a Master’s of International Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Joining a group called Peace Now, she devoted herself to promoting peace between Palestine and Israel. Then, in 1999, Espenshade experienced “an epiphany” when, on a visit with her sister to their parents’ village in Austria, she discovered that the town’s landmark castle was the headquarters for the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. Finding the convergence of her family history and her career interests too strong to resist, she enrolled at the Study Center and received the peacekeeper training that today enables her to travel as an election observer. But there was an even more powerful epiphany during her time in Austria. Espenshade decided to organize a gathering of all the Jews whose families had originated in the area, orchestrating what became a “pivotal life experience,” a chance for the descendants of the perpetrators and the families of the victims to embrace each other on the land they had once shared. “It was an extraordinary reunion,” says Espenshade, who discovered new relatives from all over the world and local people who had attended her parents’ wedding (the last that ever took place in the local synagogue) and who even remembered her grandfather’s shop and his custom of giving out candy to children. With characteristic energy, Espenshade is now pursuing a plan to establish a learning center devoted to the study of genocide and ethnic cleansing based, if possible, in the same castle in Austria that houses the peace institute. For more information about the learning center project in Austria, go to the Web site at http://home.att.net/~reginaespenshade/ And right in her Washington, D.C., neighborhood, she is active with a Boys & Girls Club, helping with tutoring and fundraising for a new building. “I do it because of the benefit I received from the Nickerson House,” she says. “I have to. Otherwise, I’m not reciprocating. I consider myself very lucky—my dreams have come true. That’s the beauty of this country. Somebody can come here with ideas and spirit and make a difference.” Jill Connors is a freelance writer based in Middletown, R.I. |
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