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As attendees of a school committed to service, many Boston College students commit their time and energy to service trips. Similarly, many of these students are haunted by the question: "What can I do to help these people after my trip is over?"
Those asking this question can look to Michelle Lyden, BC '92 and the founder of Global Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping those suffering with HIV and malnutrition around the globe. She was called back to BC to speak by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics and the BC Alumni Association.
With her amassed experiences in nonprofit and service work, Lyden clearly outlined the steps she took in forming a nonprofit health care organization to demonstrate to students the possibilities for those seeking social justice in postgraduate life.
BC affords many students the opportunity to go to countries with vastly inferior resources to offer aid through service trips. Upon their return, however, most students get on with their daily lives, unclear of how to continue providing service to the some of the neediest people in the world.
Lyden, however, saw the destruction caused by the AIDS virus, and decided that she would take her own course of action.
Through grants from the government and private sector and training in international politics and world health, she was able to form her own nonprofit organization devoted to helping orphans in Africa live fulfilling lives with the AIDS virus. It was on this subject that Lyden spoke Tuesday afternoon in the Yawkey Center.
She began her medical career as a student in the Connell School of Nursing and performed a clinical internship her senior year working with children that had hemophilia and had contracted HIV from coming into contact with contaminated blood.
She then stayed on as a nurse working with those children for six more years, "witnessing firsthand the many faces of AIDS," Lyden said.
After this initial encounter with nursing and with AIDS patients, Lyden joined a task force committed to de-stigmatizing the AIDS epidemic and educating the public about the realities of AIDS.
"I tried to minimize the fear and the ignorance around HIV," Lyden said.
Her work, along with the combined efforts of all those working in AIDS education, helped the general public come to terms with how to deal with AIDS by the end of the '90s.
Just a few years after Lyden had left her work with AIDS patients to work with healthy children, however, she encountered an infant with AIDS from South Africa.
"The family absolutely refused to have him tested [for AIDS]," she said.
Lyden explained that this refusal was because in South Africa, there was no way for a person to get AIDS medications, and the social stigma of having a family member with AIDS would have completely ostracized the family from the community.
"I realized that I wanted to work in Africa," Lyden said. "I wanted to be able to transfer the knowledge … that I had gained … here in Boston and I wanted to somehow make a difference in the lives of the children."
Lyden then went back to BC for graduate studies to become a nurse practitioner and to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, focusing in international relations. She used this knowledge to found Global Action, her nonprofit organization.
"My mandate was to train doctors and nurses in HIV care and to work with the government in developing policies around HIV and how to implement large-scale antiretroviral programs throughout their clinics," Lyden said.
Initially, she worked through a translator to train doctors that would be working with children in a country that had less than 50 pediatricians for over nine million people.
Currently, the organization is focusing on the Ruli Orphanage and hospital in Rwanda. Lyden, however, plans to use her knowledge of nursing, public health, international politics, and basic human rights to make her program in Rwanda sustainable by the Rwandan government. She then plans to move the focus of Global Action to other areas of Africa.
The work in Rwanda soon expanded due to a direct observation that Lyden made.
"What I realized was that you can't just give the medications. You have to treat the underlying malnutrition and some of the other more pervasive problems, what I call the social and economic … determinants of health," Lyden said.
She realized that even though she was there supplying the antiretroviral medications to treat HIV, other health problems such as malnutrition were directly linked to social justice issues and were affecting the children in such a way as to make the drugs irrelevant. It did not matter if the children received drugs to treat HIV; the medications poisoned them because of their lack of nutrition.
This realization led to the expansion of Global Action's mission to include bringing fresh water and nutrient-rich food to these children to restore their health.
Lyden's ability to recognize a problem by listening to what was going on around her is something she directly attributes to her education in nursing at BC.
"What is very important is just listening to what people need," Lyden said. "If given the tools and the opportunity they will find a way for economic development and to be successful. Giving them the tools, or at least trying to give them more than they have, is just one step further to meeting that goal."
She ended the talk with an invitation for more leaders from the younger generation to respond to the call for action and join her in the global struggle for human rights and social justice.
By stressing how the foundation of a BC undergraduate education prepared her for facing the immense medical struggles of her career, Lyden directly linked her successes to the possibility for current students at BC to do the same.
"Today's youth have a great opportunity to be social change agents. There's a lot that you can get involved in. We need leaders that can take great ideas and bring it into positive and sustainable action," Lyden said.
"There's no act that's not significant."
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