From Bellvue to world hot spots, Kaplan studies people

By Kate Tarasenko
Correspondent

On a recent frigid afternoon in an Old Town tavern, Richard Kaplan, a 35-year-old transplanted New Yorker who now calls Poudre Canyon his home, removes his parka, loosens his scarf, and hunkers down for a discussion about his 10-year odyssey chasing global disasters, both natural and man-made.

The Rutgers graduate, based on appearances alone, seems more at home stuffed into an easy chair, rattling away on a laptop and chugging cappuccinos, instead of hopping the cheapest flight he can book to strife-torn regions all over the world. His mission? To decode the cultural and spiritual DNA that compels modern man to not only turn a blind eye to mass-scale human suffering, but, at his worst, to cause it.

"Nicole insisted I do this," says Kaplan, referring to his entomologist wife with whom he moved to the Front Range in 1995. Fresh from his job as a human services supervisor at Foothills Gateway, where he has worked for the past six years helping devise programs for developmentally disabled adults, Kaplan seems to have tendrils reaching in all directions. Lately, the former chef has taken up writing of his first-hand accounts of his trips to some 25 countries spanning five continents. He and his wife are also new parents to daughter Alex, a 2-year-old from China whom they adopted a year ago.

Given that he tends to gravitate to countries that aren't exactly vacation destinations, Kaplan's pursuits might, at first glance, seem ghoulish. The newly proposed Greyline bus tours through post-Katrina New Orleans might even be on his holiday wish list.

But there is nothing flippant in his attitude about spending a month in Rwanda in October. "In fact," he admits, "I was really disappointed in myself, at first." After arriving in Kigali with virtually no contacts, Kaplan walked to a neighborhood bar down the road from the infamous Hotel Rwanda where he was staying. "I took a table near some men," he recalls, "not knowing whether they were killers or victims, because everyone there was killer-affected. But I was shaking so much, I couldn't lift my drink or light my cigarette."

Terrified that his visible nerves might invite trouble, he left the bar to imbibe in some "liquid courage" at his hotel. Then he returned to the bar and embarked on what has resulted in some of his most personally rewarding research.

In spite of occasionally veering toward vitriol and hyperbole, Kaplan is unapologetic as he hones his skills as a writer - not an analyst or journalist or even travelogue-diarist, but a seasoned globetrotter with a textured point of view and a healthy sense of outrage.

Whether the latest front page decries genocide between historic enemies, or foot-dragging by enriched nations when a natural disaster strikes an underdeveloped region, Kaplan argues that, for all the Western world's industrial and technological advancements and ambition, it is failing its global neighbors. This is especially the case for countries that can provide neither valuable indigenous resources nor political advantage to their rescuers.

"We seem caught in an evolutionarily backward cycle of economic and social inequities," Kaplan contends. "And it's not a level playing field." The cost, he insists, is counted - not in fallen political puppets or import-export treaties - but in individual human lives.

Kaplan scoffs good-naturedly while allowing that he is not exactly a travel agent's dream client. Most people would rather not visit areas of the world profoundly affected by war and disaster, covering thousands of sometimes treacherous miles in person, or even vicariously, through unrelenting exposure to news.

"It's overwhelming. And it's not overwhelming," he says, reconciling an apparent contradiction. "We have to keep in mind that the thing that connects us is that we are all people," a simple premise that seems lost amid nonstop, desensitizing media coverage and turgid political analysis.

"And it's beyond politics," says Kaplan. Ironically or not, he's in the midst of a long-distance graduate curriculum at the American Military University based in Manassas, Va., studying international peace and conflict resolution. He hopes to be able to learn strategies for preserving the security of nongovernmental organizations operating in "failing states," such as those he's visited over the past 10 years. Kaplan resists fitting an academic or political model to what he sees as fundamentally human problems. But he acknowledges certain socio-economic realities, agreeing that, "Poverty is a main driver of crime and war."

Between working full time at Foothills Gateway, whose "brilliant staff," as well as liberal vacation policies, figure instrumentally in Kaplan's travel plans, he stays busy co-parenting his daughter, maneuvering through a daunting mandatory reading list for school, scouring the Internet for bargain airfares and honing his language skills, which cover basic French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, "phrasebook" German, a few African dialects and some Russian. Next on the list, of course, is Chinese.

Does wife Nicole share Kaplan's seemingly insatiable wanderlust? "Obviously, Alex has changed everything," he responds. But he is quick to attest to her willing spirit as he recounts the danger they faced when they were detained for hours by armed border guards while on their way to Zagreb, a last-minute side-trip while on a ski vacation in Austria. "I just wanted to check out the war zone in the Balkans," he says.

Leaving Nicole in the car, Kaplan was rousted to an interrogation room. He couldn't understand what was going on except that the guards were very young and very, very drunk. At one point, one of them threw a pistol to Kaplan, a provocative gesture that he wisely ignored. Eventually, the couple were released.

With Indonesia on his itinerary for 2006, Kaplan is a burgeoning writer determined to engage his particular voice and viewpoint with the unfolding and often staggering events of a time that many Americans, especially those perpetually distracted by soft-serve media and hyper-consumerism, tend to dismiss.

Apathy is simply not an option, according to Kaplan. "Besides," he insists, "it's good to get freaked out."