Los Banos Rotary Club History
Local Rotary Club help outward bound

By Julian Zabalbeascoa

“That’s quite an honor,” Don Escallier, a Rotarian member, said of Timothy Hall’s achievement. Hall, a graduate student, is the third person in the last thirty-five years to win the Ambassadorial Scholarship through the Rotary Club o Los Banos.

On Tuesday, June 20, Escallier presented Hall with the first half of his $15,000 scholarship. The scholarship will send Hall to Prague for a year and a half where he will study the “lost generation.”

Hall did his undergraduate work at Harvard, studying Medieval History and Literature. He went to medical school at UC San Diego for two years, and then for two years he did his graduate work at UCSD and a year back at Harvard for his Ph.D. in Anthropology. During his trip to Prague he hopes to get enough information to do his dissertation paper for a Ph.D. in Anthropology.

While he is in Prague he will be studying through participant observation a group of “depressed Czechs.” He was originally going to study in India but last summer he went to Prague to visit a friend.

“I fell in love with the city,” Hall said. “It’s a beautiful city, really clean.”
While he was there he noticed that the people of Prague were collectively a depressed society. From 1918-36 Prague was the only democratic country in Europe. But during World War II they were handed over to Hitler by the Allies. They were occupied by Nazis until 1945. Then they were a democratic country again for two years. But the Soviet-Communist government took them over until 1989.

“You can understand why they’d have a lot of tragedy to talk about,” Hall said. “There’s a generation between 1968 to ’89 who were under communism and are still in that mindset. So that’s kinda interesting.”

He thought that the Czechoslovakians would make much better research material so he chose Prague over India.

Hall was first made aware of the Ambassadorial Scholarship when a friend of his, whose father is a member of the Rotary Club of Los Banos, notified him of such an opportunity. Though Hall doesn’t live in Los Banos – his parents live in Carmel, while his father and brother own ranches in Firebaugh – he went to Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School for elementary school, his mother was a founder of Play Daze Preschool, and his father’s parents live in Los Banos.

“We’ve been attached to Los Banos for a while,” Hall said.
He applied for the scholarship through Rotary Club of Los Banos a year ago and then went onto the district wide selection process. The district is made up of seven near-by counties. At the end of the selection process Hall was one of the three graduate students to win the Ambassadorial Scholarship.

While in Prague he will observe a group of people for a year or a year and a half. He will see them over and over again in different situations. There has been little to no study given to the Czechs’ morale or mindset. Before the Soviet block made it very difficult to get information in and out of Prague and what study has been done to the people usually deals with collecting folktales and their nationalism.

Hall hopes to get enough information so that in the long run psychiatrists would be able to have guidelines in how to figure out if a person is depressed or not without having to know the person’s culture, to teach physician’s of a cultural difference that would be useful in a clinical setting.

“There is a lot of questions that deal with a person’s culture and mental health,” Hall said.

On July 28, Hall will leave for Prague to try and find some of the answers.
“It’ll overwhelming to live in a country for a year and a half where they speak a really different language,” Hall said, “but I think it’s going to be fun.”

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