Many people were inspired in a myriad of ways leading to their work for Impact Global Health Alliance, building us into what we are since 1983. People like Alice Weldon, Henry Perry, Dardo Chavez, Nat Robison, John Wyon and Bonnie Jones and dozens and dozens more.
In 2009 I received a call from Teresa Wolf asking me to accept a position as Admin Assistant. Paying 25k/year WITH benefits, I was excited to get to work. My early days were spent getting to know the complicated printer and supporting global volunteer expeditions under EB. In this small nonprofit, change was constant and soon I was working full-time on global volunteer teams, recruiting, orienting and leading teams myself to Bolivia, Guatemala and Liberia. I met many wonderful people like Rob Blackburn and Tina Ellis and nurse Alma and Madam Sarah and many others. This experience was immensely rewarding, highly demanding and strengthened my flexibility, resilience and resolve to be part of this work.
With a Colombian-American Father, I spent the summer with family in rural Colombia when I just turned 10 years old, traveling on an international flight and making my way on a bus from Bogota to Santander on those winding Andes Mountain Roads. With first born parents who both received graduate degrees later in life, my family prioritized faith and education. I somehow got connected to the IB Programme in Middle School which tracked me right to a downtown school (not my base). Enloe HS changed my life. I had graduate trained teachers who were excited about education. We had theory of knowledge classes for lunch and I was accepted to go to China on a study abroad financed by the state department my senior year. I hold these hs yeas dear to my heart and have such gratitude for my peers and the staff at Enloe.
It was in Chad Keister’s C&C class where we watched the second tower collapse on 9/11. Mr. Keister said that this was going to change the world. I didn’t understand then. But I do now. In college i chose religous studies, specifically Islam because I wanted to understand a group of poeple and their faith (I was familiar with deep faith myself). I went to Friday Prayer and read the Quran to get past the sound bites that were meant for eyeballs not for handshakes. Paired with solidifying my Spanish language aquisition, my religious studies helped me to communicate with people who were differnet than me. At Curamericas Global , i got to put my studies to the test. I negotiated between an injured volunteer, a local surgeon (at fault??) and the hospital administrator in a cash-only society where hte generator only worked from 6-8am and 6-8pm. I was awe-struck by life-saving nurses who spoke a Mayan language and could negotiate a government contract.
when near death came to our organization and everyone else rationally sought employment elsewhere. I couldn’t go. I had to make sure the money from grants kept getting to our local heroes. That was in 2013 when I was asked to become Executive Director at the age of 26, after 4 years of working with the company (albeit across nearly every function of the business). Since then I got my MPH and MBA, update our strategic plan and grown our sustainable revenue from less than $100k/year to over 750k/year. Many people have contributed to the founding of this organization and many of those same people, whether intentionally or not, have also contributed to my own development. I hope to be able to do the same for others.