Monday, March 29, 2010

KMF Names It's 2010 Katie Evans Memorial Scholarship Recipients!

(from the KMF website)


After reviewing 119 submitted applications from 38 universities, the Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF) is proud to announce three recipients of the 2010 Katie Evans Memorial Scholarship. They are:


Mara K. Hansen (Harvard University)

Mara K. Hansen will spend parts of the next year working in India and Morocco to design a comprehensive program to reduce the transmission of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STI's) in Morocco. 
Specifically, Mara will study the success of The 
Corridors 
Project, an 
internationally
 renowned 
project
, supported by the Gates Foundation, that has 
been 
working 
on 
the 
reduction 
of 
STI 
and
 HIV/AIDS
 transmission 
among
 commercial 
sex 
workers 
in 
three 
districts
 of 
Karnataka,
 India 
since
 2005.
 Mara intends to use the Corridors Project as a template for a similarly successful program that she will design for and present to her Moroccan colleagues. As
 a Peace Corps 
volunteer 
working previously with 
the 
Moroccan 
Ministry 
of
 Health, Mara created 
educational, 
prevention
, and 
testing 
programs
 to 
protect 
the 
health 
of sex workers in the city of Boumia. 
She is currently a master 
of 
science degree candidate 
in 
global 
health 
and population

 studies at the School of Public Health at Harvard University.


Norah Herzog Meyerson (The University of Washington)

Norah Herzog Meyerson will work with Health Alliance International (HAI) in the newly independent country of Timor-Leste, to encourage healthy practices regarding maternal and child health at HAI's Birth-Friendly Facilities. Birth-Friendly Facilities (BFF's) are culturally competent, effective and sustainable medical facilities that provide an institutional alternative to home-births. In Timor-Leste, roughly 90% of women deliver at home, where medical complications are not handled safely - leading to one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Norah's program will ultimately expand the function of BFF's to include use as a women’s community center for education, discussion, and access to family planning methods in addition to offering mentorship to women in becoming champions of health in their own households and communities at large. Norah was previously a health care professional in Seattle, WA and Brooklyn, NY and a graduate of Pitzer College, where she received a scholarship based on leadership and community service. She is currently enrolled as a master of public health degree candidate at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.


Megan C. Slaughter (The University of Minnesota)
Megan C. Slaughter will work this summer with the Uganda Village Project to improve preventative health education and healthcare provisions related to malaria, safe water, hygiene and sanitation, reproductive health, and immunizations in the marginalized Iganga district. Megan will serve as the leader of a team that develops partnerships with local community members and other organizations to facilitate collaboration in reducing health disparities, while increasing the sustainability of community health programs. Megan has worked previously with Americorps, the Independent Medico Legal Unit in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. She is currently a master of public health degree candidate in community health education, with a concentration in global health and human rights, at the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.


The recipients, finalists, and semi-finalists for this year’s scholarship are listed below and posted on the KMF website shortly.


This year’s applications were reviewed by multiple board members, KMF volunteers, and public health experts, in a six-stage evaluation process. Among many impressive applicants, we feel that this year’s recipients and their projects embody those qualities of leadership, innovation, and sustainability that we are especially keen to recognize with Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships.


The Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships award one-time scholarships of up to $3,000 to graduate students in support of work in the field of international health. They are the only graduate scholarships awarded annually by a family foundation in support of grassroots international public health projects in the developing world.


Since 2007, the Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships have supported public health pioneers doing important work in communities from Mae Sot, Thailand to Pohnpei, Micronesia to Kingstown, Jamaica, at schools including Johns Hopkins University, the University of Arizona, and Katie’s alma mater, Florida International University.


The Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission to advance excellence in the international field of public health by supporting innovative, pioneering, grassroots-level projects undertaken by students follows from the things that Katie Evans believed and did throughout her remarkable life.



RECIPIENTS

Mara K. Hansen, Harvard University

Megan C. Slaughter, The University of Minnesota

Norah H. Myerson, The University of Washington



FINALISTS

Michelle Desmond, University of Washington

Devina Kuo, University of California, Berkeley

Jesse McKenna, Boston University School of Public Health

Brooke Nichols, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Kimberlee Roxburgh, University of South Florida

David Sanders, Oregon Health and Science University



SEMI-FINALISTS

Elizabeth Bunde, Tulane University

Patrick Ercole, Saint Louis University

Kathleen Maloney, Tulane University

Krystal Rampalli, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Kimberlee Roxburgh, University of South Florida

Sean Trafficante, Tulane University



Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Long View

Today, Cait is sixteen weeks and four days pregnant. She is beautiful, her energy is coming back, the nausea is going away, the test results look within the right ranges: so far, so good. I am so excited at the prospect of being a parent! And I am encouraged that so many family members and friends with kids are excited for us to join the tribe. It says something that they wish us so well at such an early stage, that despite the potential for [and their experience of] exhaustion and frustration, they are so eager and happy for us. Both Cait and I are blessed to be younger siblings, and to have had wonderful experiences with nieces and nephews, as well as friend’s kids, that suggest, to us at least, that we’re pointed in the right direction.


The Chicago doc says that fatherhood is more a state of mind than a physical change; unlike the moms, “future” dads do a lot of speculating and watching, but don’t experience much directly and personally until the child arrives. That makes sense to me. So far, caretaking and bearing witness seem to be the things I can really contribute on a day-to-day basis.


Driving down to the doctor's office for our first second-trimester visit this morning, Cait and I both marveled at Morning Edition's "The Long View" feature interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the 1981 book about grief and suffering, When Bad Things Happen To Good People. The interview is one of the best radio programs I have heard in a long while and I highly recommend devoting the roughly 8 minutes needed to listen to the whole thing. In the interview, reflecting on his teenage son's painful, tragic death from a genetic condition, Rabbi Kushner revisits the basic insights that led to the writing of the book:

"What I realized is, Where did we ever get the notion that worshiping power was the greatest compliment we could pay to God? Why is power the most admirable virtue? If I, walking through the wards of a hospital, have to face the fact that either God is all-powerful but not kind, or thoroughly kind and loving but not totally powerful, I would rather compromise God’s power and affirm his love...The theological conclusion I came to is that...God chose to designate two areas of life off-limits to his power: he would not arbitrarily interfere with laws of nature, and he would not take away our freedom to choose between good and evil."

After Katie’s death, a doctor friend of the LaPlante family offered referrals to two kinds of therapists. The first, which I ultimately settled on, was basic talk therapy. The second, which I tried and rejected, was what I jokingly referred to as “pen-light therapy,” but is more commonly known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR is a common and well-received treatment for PTSD, in which the brain is stimulated, through eye movement, to heal parts of the brain broken by traumatic experience (it’s more complicated, but that’s the basic gist). My experience of the process was of paying $250 to have a person wave a pen light against a darkened wall while touching my thigh and repeating Katie’s name, but no doubt there are more accomplished practitioners of the therapy. A friend who is working to get her acupuncture degree is looking into combinations of acupuncture and talk therapy to address PTSD in veterans, and a recent New Yorker article about psychiatry suggests that combinations of therapeutic approaches often bear out as good as or better results than prescriptions or talk therapy alone.


Looking back, I think that the Indiana doc’s approach to therapy was to allow space for grieving and sense-making, while also hammering home three or four basic insights into the grieving process and living after grief that affirmed generally the value of life and living, and specifically the value of my own life among the people I loved. These were simple, temporary structures to lean against the building of my life and keep it standing until the foundation could be put back together, but they worked. One of the first things the Indiana doc said, and then repeated at pretty much every other session, was that one day I would be sitting watching my child at a little league game, see the back of a woman's head, think for a second it's Katie, and lose it. And in this gentle mixing of two possible experiences, seemingly divergent, a new kind of narrative was suggested: I was young, I would remarry, I would become a father.


As of today’s visit, the heartbeat is strong. Cait feels good. We are feeling some very tentative enthusiasm for things. I don’t mean to presume anything about the potential experience of parenthood, other than to try to anticipate and act with humility and grace. One of the recurrent themes of this blog is an attempt to accept the fragility inherent in being alive, and the beauty that such fragility offers in the contemporary world. After watching Jim and Pam deliver their baby in last week’s episode of The Office, Cait and I signed up for a whole bevy of new-parent courses offered at the hospital where she will deliver. If Jim can diaper a football and cat, it seems, I’ve got some work to do to catch up.


Two days ago, I was offered and accepted the Jones lectureship in poetry at Stanford University, where starting this fall, I’ll be teaching undergraduate creative writing courses for the next two years. I am ecstatic at the opportunity to continue to work in the creative writing department, among so many talented peers and faculty members who have shaped my writing and writing life, and I look forward to putting in the time and energy to similarly support other, younger writers, as well as to grow in my teaching and continued writing. The group of poems I submitted with my application for the lectureship came from an elegy manuscript I finished last fall, “No Season.” Seven of these poems were accepted this week for publication by The Missouri Review, which means that the bulk of the manuscript will soon be published in various journals (see the left-side menu for links).


“No Season” follows the unexpected arc of grief and mourning, within the eventual context of finding new love. There’s this great moment at the end of Rabbi Kushner’s interview, where he says that his relationship with God hasn’t changed all that much during his lifetime:


"My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he's gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of, and we care very much about each other."


For me, finishing “No Season,” reflects the sense I’m capable of generating at this point in my life, regarding Katie’s death and my experience of living after it. If that sense contains inconsistencies, or even seems to embrace certain contradictions, I’m okay with that. There is a kind of reverence that I find personally meaningful in both having written those poems and now stopping their writing. I don’t believe that there is a clear beginning or end to love, any more than there is to life, but there are new manifestations of both that, if we’re lucky, get born again into this world, needing us to be better versions of our current selves. Probably, I’m cribbing that from somewhere else, but I can’t call to mind from where, exactly.