With the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most people would shy away from Bethlehem. Not Paris Jones, a Cornell senior from Berkeley, Calif. She spent last summer working in summer camps in Muslim villages around Bethlehem teaching art and English. She plans to spend next year teaching English in Muslim schools in the same area.

Kevin Stearns/University Photography

Paris Jones in White Hall.

During her junior year, Jones was "itching to do something." Around the same time, she discovered Holy Land Trust, an umbrella organization that sponsors summer "encounters" with Palestinians. The organization paired Jones with the United Palestinian Medical Relief Corps, an organization with mobile clinics that runs summer camps for Muslim children on the West Bank around Bethlehem. Volunteers at the clinics give the children checkups and make sure they are healthy, while the camps provide the children with something safe to do.

"Otherwise, they'd just be hanging around in the street because [Israeli} roadblocks prevent them from leaving their villages," says Jones.

Jones' experiences in Guatemala the previous two spring breaks -- where she helped build wood-burning ovens made of cinder blocks with other Cornell students -- not only were her introduction to life in the Third World but also served to help solidify her decision to go to the West Bank.

"It definitely changed my mind as far as what I was going to do in the summer and beyond, whether I was going to purely pursue academics or something more involved," she says.

Jones came to Cornell with the intention of majoring in biology, but ever since the first semester of her sophomore year, when she started her first Near Eastern studies class, she switched gears.

"In that first week of classes, I knew that this was what I wanted to do," says Jones. That semester, in fact, all but one of her classes was in Near Eastern studies. "I signed into the major the next semester."

One of the reasons Jones was so interested in Near Eastern studies is her own Catholic faith.

"I realized I didn't know enough about my own faith as well as the other Abrahamic faiths, especially Judaism," says Jones, who attended Catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade as well as during one year of high school. In ninth grade Jones and her mother moved to Seattle, where Jones transferred to public school. Many of her peers did not share her faith, and she missed the sense of community she had in her previous school. Jones says she wanted to find that again at Cornell, where she has been very involved in Aquinas, an undergraduate Catholic group to foster spiritual growth and a greater understanding of Catholicism among students. There, she served as a peer minister and moderated a weekly Jewish-Catholic dialogue.

Another passion is languages. She took Spanish for seven years, from fifth through 11th grades, at which point she started taking Japanese. She continued studying Japanese through her junior year at Cornell and also has taken Arabic since her sophomore year and Hebrew since her junior year.

Graduate student Christin Munsch is a writer intern at the Cornell News Service.