I call myself a “Synergist” - one who cooperates with others to produce an enhanced effect in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I wish I had invented the term, but Merriam - Webster says otherwise.
During my career as a US Public Health Service Officer developing and analyzing the data for national health statistics, there were times when I perceived a problem and solved it before others were aware there even was a problem. Properly merging data keypunched for a mainframe operating system with bits and bytes entered on that new-fangled invention, the microcomputer laptop, was a feat that only the US Census Bureau appreciated right away.
I retain the Chilean accent I acquired during a summer homestay in the seaside town of Constitución, Chile, before returning to the US for my senior year in high school.
During a field pretest, I developed a new committee approach to the Spanish translation of national interview surveys, which was more culturally sensitive than the one produced by some guy sitting in his office with a dictionary.
That was my first immersion in a developing country, where I learned that culture is multi-dimensional, and that calling something a “low resource environment” may not be valid. To wit: although my host mother lacked an electric washing machine, for fashion she looked to Paris, not New York and she home-schooled her three children in English while earning her master’s degree English linguistics. She left Chile for England and America, and eventually retired as a professor of Spanish linguistics at a California University.
These experiences helped me enter the arena of sustainable development where we are bringing at least one cutting-edge computer learning center to each of the 16 regions of Ghana. I work with a pair of Ghanaian partners who are among my closest friends, Medaase Paa! My Fante is nowhere as fluent as my Spanish, but hope springs eternal. You are welcome to contact me to discuss either of these cultures in more depth.
Through time and change, JE has served as the home base for my civil engineer dad, BE 1944; me, a Yale “First Woman” sophomore transfer to Yale College; my husband, a Yale biophysicist; and our daughter, JE 2017.
Deborah Rose, BA 1972, MPH 1977, SM 1975, PhD 1989, USPH CDR, Ret., QM.