Emily's Worldview

One of the reasons (though not the primary one) for my long absence from the blog, has been job applications. Right, trying to be gainfully employed for once, as of May 2007. Anyway, I wanted to share this personal statement. It has been constructively torn apart by some good friends, and the statement I submit will be very different. But it was a useful exercise for me, and I think it summarizes how I got where I am pretty nicely.

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I have had many teachers on the subjects of poverty and injustice. Growing up white and wealthy in the suburbs, I had never thought much about it except in the abstract. I spent the July before my senior year of high school at a French language academy in a small town in Virginia. During one class on Francophone Africa, the teacher explained in broad outlines the complex and intertwined challenges that Africa faces. Somehow, in the 17 years of my life to that point, I had never even heard about the cycles of poverty, hunger and illness that characterize the lives of a majority of people on the continent. I was riveted.

As a college student at the University of Chicago, I took every class on international development that I could find. I was exposed to the indifferent logic of Chicago-style development economics, but I was also introduced to powerful critiques of this approach from the fields of ethics, human rights and anthropology. When I co-founded the school’s chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign, I learned from other students already engaged in global AIDS advocacy. They taught me how to advocate against the outrageous and immoral public health policies that were denying treatment to millions of people dying from HIV-related illnesses in the developing world. In books by Paul Farmer, I learned that challenging the status quo and putting the needs of the poorest and sickest people at the center of policy is a strategy that can create change, even for people living in the harshest conditions.

During two summers in college, and for a year after I graduated, I went to Africa, where I found even more teachers. My neighbors in Tanzania showed me what it means to wake up in the morning without sugar for your tea, much less medicine for your fever and money for your child’s school fees. The leader of the organization I worked for let me take up some of her duties and so I learned what it feels like to have a steady stream of people knocking at your door, each person with a story more heartbreaking than the one before, and each one of them asking you for help. I felt outrage as people I knew died of HIV, the promised drugs not yet delivered to the public hospital, but the Tanzanians around me were resigned. I learned that injustice can come to seem acceptable when it becomes the grinding routine.

These days I spend my time at the school of public health. I am learning in the classroom about HIV programs and public health approaches that are successful, and about programs that fail. I am learning how to count and measure and speak the language of donors. My classes on human rights and anthropology have offered a moral framework for evaluating these, and I have been engaging in advocacy about public health together with other students. But I learn the most two mornings a week, when I board a city bus to a homeless outreach center in downtown Atlanta. There, our guests teach me about what brutal injustices can be found mere miles from the comfortable house I rent. One client’s face was scarred from an aggressive bacterial infection that attacked him after he progressed to AIDS. While he was hospitalized, he was evicted from his apartment, and all his belongings thrown away. Today he lives a basic existence in a program for people living with HIV and dealing with mental illness as well, another victim of the intertwined injustices of illness and poverty in the richest country in the world.

What all these teachers taught me about injustice, is that it is worth fighting. Working side by side with Tanzanians who ignored their own poverty to serve other people, and providing services to people who are not being served by an unjust world order, is worthy and necessary. But what I have also learned about injustice is that it will never be enough merely to manage its effects. It must also be challenged at its source, by people with influence in solidarity with people who have none. That is, the policy that affects the lives of people living with HIV should be formed to fulfill the rights of those people, and advocates are the ones who must call for the fulfillment of rights. I want to be engaged in this struggle. I want to be a part of advocating for change and engaging in service both. I believe that what I have learned and experienced so far will allow me to contribute in a substantial way to creating change. And at the same time, I know that I also have a great deal more to learn.