Santa Rosa man returns from world travels with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof with changed perspective

Back from India and Nepal, where he and a renowned New York Times columnist chronicled vast deprivation and glimmers of hope on an odyssey of discovery, 24-year-old Austin Meyer struggles, you might say, to keep his eyes open.

This has nothing to do with jet lag. Meyer, a 2010 graduate of Santa Rosa’s Maria Carrillo High with a fresh masters degree in journalism from Stanford University, is no doubt more alert than ever.

“Honestly, it was life-changing,” he said of his 10 days abroad in October with the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who has earned two Pulitzer prizes as he calls for conscience and action to counter human misery and abuses around the world.

“I just gained a whole new whole perspective on life and the art of storytelling and its potential to make a global impact,” Meyer said.

At 4 p.m. Saturday, he’ll speak of his journey at a public meeting of the World Affairs Council of Sonoma County at the Glaser Center on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa.

Selected by Kristof from among 450 exceptional college students who applied to the columnist’s 2015 Win-A-Trip contest, Meyer accompanied the journalist first to a drug-besieged neighborhood of Baltimore, then to India’s teeming and impoverished state of Uttar Pradesh and a remarkable, rural eye-surgery camp in southern Nepal.

During their trip and also upon returning, both Kristof and Meyer wrote stories that were published in the Times.

In his most recent piece, “Opening Eyes,” published less than a week ago, Meyer wrote about impoverished people in Nepal whose eyesight is restored by doctors such as Sanduk Ruit, who performs ?100 cataract surgeries a day at the Hetauda Community Eye Clinic.

Meyer introduced his readers ?to 80-year-old Purni Maya, so blinded ?by cataracts that “she says she can’t ?see me. I am sitting right next to her.”

Meyer, the youngest of three sons of Pam and Dr. Leroy Meyer of Santa Rosa, concluded the blog on his visit to India and Nepal with this:

“What I realized in Hetauda was I can’t let the scale of global development challenges cripple me. If Dr. Ruit had let the scale of global blindness stop him from developing a groundbreaking cataract surgery procedure, Maya would never see her daughter again. And if I let the scale of global development challenges stop me from dedicating my life to help end them, I will never get to be a part of a moment when eyes are opened to a new world - and a life is changed forever.”

He said by phone from Palo Alto, where he now lives and has just ?begun work with the international ?software developer SAP, that he returned from Nepal and India deeply affected by the human suffering he witnessed, and also by the caring he saw at the eye clinic and in the life of a 14-year-old girl rescued from a sex-slave network.

“I don’t want to lose those feeling over time,” Meyer said. “I want to hold on to those feelings as much as possible.”

The Santa Rosa native is determined that he’s not finished using storytelling to shed light on suffering and on means of easing it.

Meyer’s work impresses Kristof, who since 2006 has selected extraordinary young writers to accompany him overseas. Kristof said by email that each year “I try to pick a student who will be a terrific blogger, able to communicate these issues to other students.

“But the truth is that I’m also looking for somebody who is going to be fun ?to deal with and won’t fall apart if we miss lunch or find rats in the hotel room. And Austin was indeed a terrific travel mate.

“With his journalistic skills and determination, I’m sure he’ll have a huge impact on whatever field he chooses.”

Kristof called Meyer “a terrific journalist, so good that he upstaged me.”

The columnist recounted that in India, “we both wrote about how many children’s lives could be saved through helping moms with breastfeeding, and I did a straightforward column.”

Meanwhile, Kristof said, Meyer “told the same story through two kids in a village - one who had not been optimally breastfed and was stunted, and another who was the picture of health. And then Austin had a photo of the two kids side by side. It was just a great way to tell the story, and a reminder of why I like to take talented young journalists on these trips.”

In that story illustrated by a photo of a healthy child alongside a badly undernourished one, Meyer wrote that it’s a huge but essential undertaking to demonstrate to new mothers in India that the cultural practice of starting their babies on water or honey for a few days before beginning breastfeeding is not at all good for the newborns.

“On this trip,” he wrote, “I have been fascinated by the tension between factual knowledge and tradition.

“It has given me an appreciation for how difficult health interventions can be. Simply transmitting knowledge is very unlikely to change behavior.

“But looking at these two kids, you see the stakes.”

Amid the great deprivation he and Kristof witnessed in southern Nepal, Meyer was heartened both by the work at the eye-surgery clinic and by his discovery of a girl who was “a border checkpoint away from being a sex slave.”

He wrote that the child of 14 was desperately poor, living outdoors since the massive earthquake of last April destroyed her family’s home, when a relative told her of a good-paying job in India.

“So,” Meyer’s Oct. 28 story reported, “one morning at 5 a.m. she snuck away .?.?. she thought she would be making clothes, but her trafficker had other plans.” She was on her way, Meyer wrote, to becoming one of an estimated 20,000 women and girls secreted from Nepal to India each year as sex slaves.

“Thankfully,” the story continues, “as she crossed the border into India, members of Maiti Nepal, a leading anti-trafficking organization, saw the young teenager and recognized the all-too-familiar scenario. She now is back in her mother’s arms.”

Also back home again, Meyer is resolved not to forget the nearly lost girl in Nepal, nor the many others around the world whose stories, important for humanity to be told, await someone to tell them.