‘Ask No Guarantees, Ask for No Security: See the World’

As he sat in the Old City — in the ornately designed lounge of his hotel in the Arab section of Jerusalem — Tommy Mulvoy ’96 scanned an ominous, flash flood-like warning from the U.S. State Department, urging Americans to defer travel to the West Bank immediately.

 

“Violent demonstrations, kidnappings, and shootings are unpredictable and can occur at any time,” the message read, forebodingly.

 

It was the fall of 2008: Mulvoy was in the midst of a five-month, 20-country tour of the world, his goal to stuff his senses with the history that he taught, his most central objective to become physically and emotionally closer to the Israeli–Palestinian Separation Wall.

 

“I taught the Israel–Palestinian conflict for six years at Brunswick in my World Cultures class,” said the 1996 ’Wick graduate, who also worked in the Academic Support Office and coached hockey and lacrosse during his professional return to his alma mater, from 2002–2008. 

 

“But, as much as I studied the barrier, my lessons only scratched the surface of the Separation Wall’s construction. I desperately wanted to engage with the Wall — to grapple with it and to climb inside Palestinian skin.”

 

And so, here he sat — merely 20 kilometers south of the city of Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority in the central West Bank — strongly advised by his own government not to move.

 

He got up and headed to his room for the night, not reading or returning to another word of the message. Sleepless hours of tossing and turning — of endless wondering and wavering — awaited him.

 

When he awakened, Mulvoy had made up his mind, deciding to press on to the Wall despite the clear and present threats of danger — soon crossing into Ramallah at the infamous Qalandia Checkpoint. 

 

“I realized that a true sense of failure and regret would have settled into the deepest recesses of my soul,” Mulvoy explained to Upper School students during his January visit to Maher Avenue. “I couldn’t turn back.”

 

Hours later, he’d befriended a local doctor. He’d been given a ride by a man who sensed he was lost. He’d been handed an orange by a fruit seller on the street.

 

And, most important, he’d forgotten about the State Department’s warnings of “shootings,” “kidnappings,” and “gun battles.”

 

“The immediacy of the strangers’ generosity and their spirit of engagement decisively won the battle that I had struggled with the previous night,” he said. “It was an influential victory that continues to rule my life today.”

 

For Mulvoy, that life has since taken him to King’s Academy in Amman, Jordan — a country very much then (and now) in the throes of enormous political change — where he taught for two years, from 2011 to 2013. 

 

He, too, has returned to the Wall, even chaperoning a small group of students to the tiny Palestinian village of Mas Ha during Eid al Adha, the Islamic festival commemorating the willingness of Abraham to follow Allah’s command to sacrifice his son Ishmael.

 

After two years teaching English at Mary McDowell Friends School, a Quaker school in Brooklyn, N.Y., for students with learning disabilities, Mulvoy will next venture to Basel, Switzerland, with his new bride, Vicky, a native of London.

 

On campus to encourage students to pursue Study Abroad and Foreign Language Immersion Programs, Mulvoy left his fellow Bruins with a lasting piece of advice — one he found while in the literary depths of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

 

“See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal,” he quoted.

 

“And, if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day sleeping its life away.

 

“To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”