“遵循你点亮的东西”：猫jaffee'08的非常规生活
“My friends joke that my life sounds like a game of Mad Libs,” says Cat Jaffee ’08. “‘Honey hunter in eastern Turkey’ and ‘podcaster in rural Angola’ sound like made-up jobs.” But Jaffee has been both, as well as a rural-development business owner, a Fulbright scholar, a communications director, and a国家地理探险家受助人。“没有我在Wellesley的机会，我没有办法导致如此非常规生活，”她说。
Jaffee arrived at Wellesley in fall 2005 after transferring from New York University: “You can live in a city the rest of your life, but you can only go to college once,” she says. She wanted a small liberal arts college and access to “all the fellowships, all the cool programs, all the unique opportunities I’d never get to have at another point in my life.”
在校园里，哈菲是船员团队的队长和Wellesley的Edware Group成员严肃, alongside阿里巴瑟韦尔'10andClaire Ayoub'11. Jaffee credits Dead Serious with teaching her how to be a creative problem solver: “When you do improv with a group of women-identifying people, that means every character in every sketch is played by a woman. You need someone to play the president of the United States? It’s going to be a woman. A terrorist? A woman. A serial killer? Also a woman. You get to play all the parts, and imagine yourself in roles that you might not normally have.”
But it was her off-campus experiences while at Wellesley that changed the course of Jaffee’s life: She spent the summer of 2007 in rural Japan as a劳劳学者and traveled to Bihar, India, for the fall semester of her junior year, where she lived and studied in a Buddhist monastery. “I meditated six hours a day and learned about the philosophy of the mind, and studied with all these different monks,” she says. “When else in your life do you get to do something like that other than during college?”
这些经历让她对故事，宗教和政治如何通过基于人类迁移的地区来发展的感兴趣。在政治学与宗教中毕业后毕业后，她获得了富布赖特奖学金，以研究土耳其的这个话题。在那里，她采访了保守的耕作妇女从农村地区转移到城市，成为当地政治的领导者，然后她回到了家庭村庄，试图了解他们的移民经历如何影响他们的身份。
During that time, Jaffee also fell in love with honey. Many of the rural, nearly abandoned villages in Turkey she traveled to had been taken over by migratory beekeepers, and Jaffee began to study and document them. Soon, she was applying for more grants and funding, and she ended up spending five years in Turkey studying bees and beekeepers. She even began her own business,Balyolu：蜂蜜路, a honey-tasting trekking company that supported women entrepreneurs in local villages.
Jaffee returned to the United States in 2014 as the political situation in Turkey was becoming less stable. Once she was back, she felt depressed and lost. “I had developed all these really specific skills,” Jaffee says. “While many of my friends had learned how to live in cool apartments, or find partners and have kids, or develop careers, I could differentiate different kinds of honey and speak Turkish fluently. I could barter and hustle in several very specific regional languages. I could repair a car on the side of the road and jump borders easily. But I didn’t know how to be part of conventional American society.”
她通过各种通信工作洗牌，不觉得对。最终，她戒了，她花了几个月的时间离开了她的车，训练成为一个EMT，并在听播客时驾驶。
播客变成了詹菲尔的下一个重点：“我刚知道我不得不制作这个媒介。”但哈菲的进入播客世界的高成本受到沮丧 - 昂贵的装备，需要一个安静的工作室空间，所有软件的成本 - 加上该行业由白人主导的事实，独联体男性。哈菲耶尔彼得在经济上有特权;她的父亲在她年轻的时候去世了，随着遗产他离开了她，她在她的家庭州买了大都会的房产，她在2016年开始进入一个双工并租用。
如果我们将在世界上发展，我们需要想象力和创造力。
Cat Jaffee ’08
“当有一些稳定性的稳定性时，会发生创造力，”贾菲德解释道。“我真的很喜欢，但我知道，但我认为icky是什么让icky是你做的或不做的。”Jaffee想让自己制作播客，帮助他人创造它们，所以在2018年开始套房，丹佛的全方位服务中心，任何人都可以通过可访问的播客。她还在那里打开了一个播客孵化器，为希望闯入该领域的媒体所谓的人。
In addition to running House of Pod, Jaffee produced podcasts for Rocky Mountain PBS, SAPIENS magazine, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, among others. In 2019, she was awarded another国家地理探险家讲故事，这次她前往安哥拉东部纪念Okavango水系统的故事。四个月，她与35个科学家的大篷车一起生活在一部分在安哥拉的野生动物，几十年来到公众。通过泥炭沼泽来记录蝙蝠，避免地雷，囤积足够的煤气和食物，持续数月，悬挂在卡车后面，同时伸出她的麦克风，听到人们的故事 - 哈菲回到她的元素中。
但这是一个艰难的四个月:贾菲感觉病情加重and sicker, and by the time she flew back to Colorado in February 2020, she could barely walk and had a massive bulge in her side. After several doctors dismissed her concerns, a physician who had spent time in Sierra Leone happened to treat Jaffee in the ER. He quickly figured out that Jaffee had malaria and dengue fever; later on, after a surgery gone wrong, Jaffee was also diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
“虽然很多人都在制作酸味，但我的Covid项目正在努力死，”Jaffee说。她在手术中恢复了大流行早期，从手术中恢复过来。在已经隔离的时间期间，由于她的癌症治疗，贾菲尔甚至更孤立。
尽管如此，哈菲仍然在她的播客项目上工作。她通过她在安哥拉录制的数千小时的录像带中排序，她拼凑在一起，通过使用声音设计师和作曲家来找到连接。她发布了Guardians of the River在2021年夏季，该系列赢得了在播客码号的Shetribeca电影节和杰克逊狂野媒体奖的2021年最佳叙事非小费播客奖。哈菲德在完成化疗待遇的一周年纪念日出版了最后一集;她的癌症已经进入缓解。现在，她正在与之合作野鸟信托to have the podcast episodes translated into Portuguese and Tswana, and distributed to radio stations in Angola and Botswana.
And after that, who knows? “We need to have imagination and creativity if we are going to make our way in the world,” Jaffee says. “You have to follow the things that light you up.”
