MaryAnn Dakkak
"That's what I do," she said, explaining how her parents and extended family moved from Egypt to Brazil, France, and the U.S. before she was born, laying the groundwork for a lifetime of travel visiting family in places where she would see poverty and health disparities up close. Now, she is embarking on a new chapter of her peripatetic life with an eye toward HIV/AIDS prevention as well as toward women's health issues in developing countries.
"My parents taught me it was important to recognize poverty and not to ignore it, not to be scared of it, but to treat all people equally, like human beings," she said.
On June 8, Dakkak will receive a master of science degree in population and international health from HSPH, as well as a certificate in humanitarian studies from the Inter-University Initiative on Humanitarian Studies and Field Practice.
Just a few weeks after graduation, Dakkak will leave for Chad to begin a yearlong fellowship in international development for Catholic Relief Services. In Chad, Dakkak will focus on HIV programming and community building that will cross tribal lines in the hopes that such cooperation will foster justice and peace in the region. The country experienced 30 years of civil war until about 1990. There are still outbreaks of armed conflict.
While an undergraduate at Santa Clara University in California, Dakkak spent a great deal of time working with the Santa Clara Community Action Program in East Palo Alto and other impoverished sections of the Bay Area. She also did health assessments, taught English as a second language, built houses for low-income families, and did other volunteer work in Mexico, Bulgaria, El Salvador, and Bosnia with a variety of agencies.
In 2002, she received a grant to do HIV/AIDS prevention work in a remote village in Lesotho with Operation Crossroads Africa. In 2003, she interned under the auspices of UNESCO at the International Union for Biological Sciences in Paris, where she assisted in planning a major international conference for that agency in Cairo. In addition to her studies, for the past two years Dakkak has worked as a teaching assistant and research assistant at Harvard, MIT, and Shriner's Hospital in Sacramento, CA.
When she came to HSPH, Dakkak knew that she wanted to do health programming in crises or complex emergencies. That is why she enrolled in the humanitarian studies certification program through the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. She is interested especially in mid-conflict and post-conflict response, which includes peace negotiation, conflict resolution, and community building.
She's especially interested in the health needs of women in developing countries. She wants to know what women perceive as their most pressing health problems and how they conceptualize solving those problems. This interest led her recently to conduct a women's health needs assessment for the Nord Office Ministry of Health (MSPP) in Haiti, as part of program development for that agency, through Konbit Santé, an NGO based in Portland, Maine. She expects to present the results of her assessment in Haiti next month, before her fellowship begins.
—PHC
Copyright, 2009, President and Fellows of Harvard College
