Joyce Nimocks ’15 has fond memories of her grandmother teaching her to make body butter out of olive oil and using natural, homemade concoctions on her granddaughter’s curly hair.

Nimocks’ grandmother was both creative and resourceful. Store-bought hair products were usually made for women who wore their hair straight. Mainstream cosmetics made Nimocks’ skin break out. And money was tight.

After graduating from Pomona last May with a $12,000 Napier Initiative grant in hand, Nimocks returned to her hometown of Chicago to conduct free summer workshops for low-income women of color to inform them of the ingredients in commercial cosmetics and teach them how to make their own products with natural, non-toxic ingredients.

An environmental analysis major, Nimocks wrote her thesis on the health implications of hair relaxers. Exploring the issue in depth through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program, as well as her study-abroad in Brazil, she found an extensive study showing an association between African American women who frequently used hair relaxers and the presence of uterine fibroids.

She cites research indicating that hair relaxers seep through the epidermis,   making it easier for estrogen-mimicking hormones to enter the bloodstream. In addition to inducing fibroids and uterine cysts, they have been implicated in causing premature puberty in girls as young as six months old.

“What I found is that this isn’t just a public health issue; this is also a social justice issue, in my opinion, because these products are only being marketed toward women of color,” says Nimocks.

The injustice continues because all-natural products are prohibitively expensive for low-income women, she says. “You can get a bottle of a non-natural brand of lotion—32 ounces for four dollars at Walmart. You get a small 12-16 ounces of a natural brand, and it costs you seven to eight dollars,” says Nimocks.

In her workshops, she focused on teaching women how to make lipsticks on stovetops with beeswax, shea butter and crayons; body butters using a cake mixer, with aloe vera gel, cocoa butter and, of course, olive oil; and natural perfumes with witch hazel and essential oils. One of Nimocks’ favorite homemade products is her deodorant, a blend of coconut oil and baking soda, infused with lavender, orange and tea tree oils.

Nimocks herself is a powerhouse blend, according to Professor of Environmental Analysis Char Miller. “She has a compelling ability to weave together her academic interests with her activism, her professional and civic engagement,” says Miller.

Nimocks hopes to someday open a center where low-income women can come and make their own cosmetics for free, funded by workshops she’d conduct for a fee in middle-to-high-income communities.

Thanks to a six-week Social Entrepreneurship class taught through the Draper Center for Community Partnerships, Nimocks has written a business proposal to start a nonprofit. She says her summer research and classes like these have given her the confidence required to believe she can bring big ideas to life.

“It’s about beauty,” she explains. “It’s about relaxation. It’s about self-care and self-love. I can really see my organization being a place where women feel comfortable going to and even talking about community issues. I can see it being a really integral part of communities and also partnering with other community organizations, like libraries or YMCAs in Chicago.”

But before she launches into that project, she has more research to do. Funded by a prestigious $30,000 Watson Fellowship, Nimocks is currently on a tour of Ghana, Japan and South Africa to work with artisans, farmers and other groups and learn about the ways they use local ingredients to produce sustainable, handmade cosmetics.

Nimocks recalls conversations with her grandmother while making their beauty products in the kitchen. Years later, recreating relationships around all-natural cosmetics is a tribute to her heritage. “My grandmother would be really happy,” she says.

A middle-aged Cuban sat at an outdoor table in an alley across from a Havana restaurant that our group would soon enter. Wearing a red and blue baseball shirt, he smiled faintly, and I thought, “Not another panhandler in this impoverished but on-the-way-up nation.”

As I would soon learn, however, this was no panhandler, but a former athlete, one of a number of Cubans of all ages chosen by tour planners to put a human face on today’s Cuba. Rey Vicente Anglada dined with us that afternoon, and then, through an interpreter, highlighted his career as a player and manager for the Industriales and the Cuban national baseball team.

We were 24 Americans visiting Cuba for 10 days. Although at this writing, individual visits by American tourists remain illegal, the recent thaw in relations with Cuba has opened the door to people-to-people (“P2P”) programs like ours, this one operated by smarTours of New York. For my part, I was here to satisfy my own curiosity about the intertwining histories of our two countries, to find out for myself how this Caribbean communist state worked or didn’t, and to meet the island’s people.

The cultural exchanges turned out to be mostly one-sided, but we talked to countless Cubans in all lines of work—artists, teachers, students, cowboys, musicians, actors, guides, fishermen, restaurant owners and one former baseball player.

The first person we met, and in many ways the most interesting, was our 43-year old national guide, Enedis Tamayo Traba. Accompanying us throughout the tour, she put her own spin on both Cuba’s achievements and its failures. A married mother of two, she modestly declared at the outset: “Welcome to my humble country. It is not perfect.” Another time, she noted: “Under Batista, we were mostly poor. Fidel gave us food, housing and health care, which is why we love him.” And in what might have been a popular joke during the Soviet-influenced era, she offered this explanation for the fact that few Cubans are overweight: “The elevators don’t work.”

The tour put us up in a series of luxury properties in Havana (the Melia Cohiba) and Guardalavaca (Playa Pesquaro) near Holguin and at modest but comfortable hotels in Cienfuegos and Camaguey. However, as we toured, there were frequent reminders of the nation’s poverty. Once, Enedis took us to visit a cheerless government store where a farmer had lined up with his rationing book to claim his meager allowance of rice.

However, we also caught frequent glimpses of burgeoning free enterprise—rooms for rent in private dwellings, roadside fruit stands and elderly vendors hawking tiny roasted peanuts to supplement their incomes. In Camaguey, two budding entrepreneurs set up a makeshift display to sell shoes, and puppeteers put on a professional show in a makeshift theatre where seating consisted of about 20 folding chairs.

And then, there are the paladares—homes converted into surprisingly good restaurants. In a country that rations rice, cooking oil, milk and other staples, tourists dine in these privately owned restaurants on shrimp, lobster, crab and fish. At the retro art-decorated La California in Havana, a family-style dinner included pumpkin soup, rolls, black beans and rice, lobster tails, red snapper with vegetables and ropa vieja, a classic dish of shredded beef and spices.

On our final day in Havana, we entered the Partagas Cigar Factory, divided between experienced workers and trainees in hot, humid rooms. Our factory guide, Augustin, related how tobacco leaves are selected for different cigars. By Cuban standards, rolling cigars is a relatively well-paid job, and one that is eagerly sought. Two Romeo and Juliet cigars packed in metal tubes, a gift for a friend, cost me $6.95 each, about 20 percent of the average Cuban’s monthly wage.

Wherever we went in Cuba, we found the artistic muse alive and well. We visited five galleries of different creative pursuits, including the manic display of ceramic art of Jose Fuster in Havana and the feminist art at the Martha Jimenez Gallery in Camaguey.

Musicians entertained us endlessly at concerts and restaurants. At dinner one night in Camaguey, a young man played a trumpet as a woman danced to Latin music near our tables. The musician used a mute to soften the sound against a background of recorded music on a CD, and his partner made her hip-moves while waitresses dodged around her to serve the meal. After one tune, I asked him if he had just played a John Coltrane piece, “Straight, No Chaser.” He quickly answered, “Night in Tunisia … Dizzy Gillespie.”

And of course, any account of a visit to Cuba would be incomplete without some mention of those amazing vintage American cars, visible on postcards, placemats and paintings as well as in the streets. Without them, Cuba simply wouldn’t be Cuba. At different times, drivers chauffeured members of our group in a 1940 Chevrolet sedan and a 1958 Edsel convertible, both impeccably maintained in spite of the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of the U.S. embargo. A 1954 Studebaker parked at a roadside gasoline station could undoubtedly win top prize in a restored vehicle competition in the States.

This tour didn’t come cheap, but we met Cubans and toured their country in ways that I couldn’t have done on my own—even if it were legal.

For those interested in taking part in a people-to-people visit to Cuba, it’s important to keep in mind that (in the words of a customer service representative at smarTours) “it’s not like going to the Jersey shore for a weekend.”

The required paperwork is extensive, including a registration form and a copy of your passport page for the tour company, a Treasury Department travel affidavit confirming that you’re participating in a people-to-people visit; a reservation form for Cuba Travel Services; a visa application; and a variety of health forms.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

• Credit cards aren’t accepted and ATMs aren’t available, so be sure to bring extra cash for emergencies.
• Cuba charges a 13% fee to exchange American dollars into Cuban convertible pesos (known as CUCs) but no fee to exchange Canadian dollars or Euros into the national currency, so you can save money by converting your travel money into Canadian bills before you leave
• Photography is prohibited at Cuban airports and military facilities.
• The Treasury Department mandates that P2P tourists keep a daily travel journal and keep it for five years, in order to prove that the trip was legal.