Development Studies, International Relations, and Obstetrics: Nawal Nour at TEDxBrownUniversity

good afternoon thank you so much for the organizers for inviting me I think that this morning session was absolutely fabulous and I do hope that we can continue delivering the excellent lectures um I wanted to talk a little bit about myself but the question that was initially posed was about liberal education life learning and liberal education and the most important thing is who's your audience and so it's very clear that this is parents weekend so I'm speaking to you parents and also the students are here so I'm also speaking to you as students I think there are some alums but in general my talk is going to be to the parents and the students um the other thing I wanted to talk about was sort of my journey people always talk about the fact that they've been going down a road or taking a path and I am originally Sudanese I was born in Khartoum and I started thinking that in fact I don't really go down a road I really actually cruise through the river and my River is the River Nile and the reason why it works so well is that when I was starting to develop as a child and a young girl and adolescent and then a woman um I had two major interests and much like the River Nile there are two sources there is Lake Tana which is the origins of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia and then there is Lake Victoria in the origins of the White Nile in Uganda and so let me start a little bit about this river that I take down and as you know rivers when they flow sometimes they flow nicely and easily sometimes they're very rapid sometimes there are waterfalls sometimes they're dams but the thing about a river is it meanders it curves it takes sharp things and then it goes slowly and then sometimes it dries up in times of drought and then it rapid the rains come down and then it starts rapidly moving forward and thus I think is my journey so when I was young one of the very first books I read was from no Anna Solley she's an Egyptian psychiatrist who is also a advocate and really speaks a lot against female genital mutilation female circumcision you'll hear me using different terminology and that's pretty much because most of my patients use those terms differently so here's no honest ad that way my first introduction to female genital cutting and it's a story about a woman who was forced into prostitution and as she was trying to escape she ended up murdering her pimp she was put in jail and she had a life sentence and during this con this book the description of the fact that she had been circumsized came out and it was my first moment of understanding what female genital cutting female circumcision was all about so I read other books of hers and the next book that I did read was the hidden face of Eve and the very first chapter is about no honest Todd now he's owned circumcision and she was a sick it was the chapters called the mutilated half and she was six years old she was lying comfortably in her own bed when some cold hands went and grabbed her a cold hand cupped her mouth and held her down and when she saw that that stale steel blade coming towards her she thought it was going to her throat instead it went to her groin and her biggest question was mom where are you and so she screamed out only to find out that the mom one of the hands that was holding her down was her mother's and it be created a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder for her now this is a disturbing story and I should tell you that the majority of my patients don't have those types of stories but let me continue debt you down on my journey so I went and Britton wrote book reports I went through high school I came here to brown and one of the things that is so special about about Brown is that when you get admitted or when we used to get admitted at Brown we would get this big envelope and so if you get accepted it just was a big M that said yes I was so thrilled to get that big envelope and I do have to say that these days I don't think you guys get big envelopes anymore but I think you should consider coming back to that because it's a special moment in your life so here I am I'm admitted to brown I'm premed take biology organic chemistry I'm planning to become a doctor because in my career I was very interested in women's health and I had thought I would be playing a role in regards to you know impacting female genital cutting but at the same time in 1984 when I was a freshman we are the world was a song that was coming out because in Ethiopia there was a massive famine and the first words of we are the world is it there comes a time where you heed a certain call and that song played in my dorm room over and over again and I really felt that it was important that I do something in regards to this famine and there was a political debate y'see why are the Ethiopians dying again why is this famine is it political is it truly that there's droughts how can we stop it and as I was spending my freshman year really having a good time and going to funk night as they're still funk night uh I loved funk night um that in fact I felt like I had a calling and I needed to do something with it so over the summer I spent a month in England my mother was living there at the time and worked at with an Ethiopian organization fundraising for Ethiopians and then I spent a about a month working volunteering with Save the Children and I worked in a refugee camp on the eastern border of Sudan very close to Ethiopia and I became the right hand student to this Mexican doctor who pretty much was although he's a primary care doctor he took care of the kids and the mothers he delivered babies he was I there was war so there were stab wounds that we were repairing and I was there on hit by his side weighing the tiny little babies and making sure that they were gaining weight every day and they were because say the children was providing the food and at the end of that one would think that in fact I would be decide that this is the moment that I would indeed become a doctor but I actually my River changed I had curved to another direction and I came back to brown and actually stopped being pre-med because I decided that I didn't want to really work on one individual I wanted to help many people and Save the Children was one of those organizations that actually helped in many different countries and that was the kind of impact I wanted to make in the world so here I am learning from books learning from magazines learning from music and helping me get towards a course that I wanted to go down so when I was at Brown I had a wonderful professor Lena ferzetti who was not only my my professor but she was my mentor and one of the things that in life I encourage every one of us to have our Mentors it is a type that you they become your friend your colleague your confidant to help you move forward in your life and your career and Dena was that for me she was my adviser I wrote an honors thesis on the emancipation of the Egyptian woman and she was by my side when I had problems and I couldn't quite figure out which paragraph went where in which chapter I should keep in which I should get rid of and so the importance of mentors are critical and I am always very grateful to her for that the next thing I did was I graduated from Brown and then I went and worked at the United Nations but for the division for women in development so this is perfect right here I am have graduated I got the job that I want and that year I was in New York City mm-hmm I stalled I didn't know what to do I hated the job I hated the work I decided there was no way I would be able to do development what was I thinking and how did I get to where I was and I was stuck so suddenly here I was in this river where I didn't know whether I could flow any further and I think as parents many of you may feel that your child graduates from from from college and isn't doing anything and dear God didn't you educate them and spend so much time so that they could do something and so here I was not sure what to do I knew that I had my two passions right the blue nile and the white nile that one has to do with health issues female circumcision women's issues and the other one was about just making the world a better place my Global Drive and so I ended up reading a lot that's that year and one of the books that I read was 1l because I wasn't sure would I go to law school to deal with the human rights issues or was I going to go to med school and deal with the health issues and so I read 1l and I went through it and all and I read it from page to page and beginning to end and the answer was dear God I'm never going to become a lawyer so it was a combination no offense to Scott Turow and any lawyers in this audience but it wasn't right for me and at that moment I realized I needed to go and become a physician and so I went and did my pre-med requirements and got it went to Harvard Medical School um but that was my merger that was where the two rivers came together my two interests I was interested in women's health and I was interested in helping the world and the two came together as you can see here the blue and the white nile merge together in Khartoum to form the River Nile after I was at medical school and residency I didn't know obstetrics and gynecology residency of course because I'd had to do with women I was slowly but surely gathering a group of patients who were African immigrants and refugees who had undergone female genital cutting and met as many of you know when you want to go to a physician you usually ask your friends or family members who's a good doctor and this is what has happened in the African community that people started asking around who's a good doctor who understands issues of FGM female genital cutting and the and behold I had a practice that was starting to fill up with these kinds of patients I then was graduating from the residency program and I thought you know I have something going on here what should I do with this and again I was getting to this point of do I leave do I not and it was a moment of uncertainty and we'd heard about this earlier today when you're at a moment of uncertainty in fact that is the best time to be able to be creative and to sit in that uncertainty is actually a privilege it's when we're already in our course that we know what we're doing but when you're uncertain when you don't know what your next step is relish it because then you do make that next step and hopefully it is the right next step for you um I was I knew that there was an African women's health center in London and I went and visited it and thought well maybe we could try to do something like that in Boston when I went to the health center I realized in fact I was already doing what they were doing all I needed to do was formalize it and that's what I ended up doing is that I went to the chairman and said asked him dr. Robert Barbieri and I asked him you know what do you think this is unusual it's not really the bread and butter of what we do at the Brigham and Women's Hospital but why not why not create an African women's health center we can pilot it if we don't like it we can get rid of it and he gave me and he in the hospital gave me their blessing and in 1999 I founded the African women's health center where we provide holistic care to women who've undergone female genital cutting and the kind of care that we give is no no better than any other care we're basically pay physicians nurses social workers nutritionists midwives and interpreters who understand that there are some women out there who have been circumcised and in some ways it's not something that we want to make a big deal about we want to nurture these patients but we don't want to ostracize them and the reason I mention this is that there's so many times where we lose the potential of maintaining a patient as a patient and there are times where for instance you might go to a doctor and say you know what not going back to that one because I don't feel that doctor really understood me listen to me or really wanted to know what my issues were and that's what some of these refugees feel is that they come in and I even just a glimpse of a bad look you know oh you've been circumcised oh you've been cut what kind of mother what kind of parents would do this that kind of those types of comments or just glances and looks can turn a patient away and I've had moments or I've had times where patients will come to me and say I went to the emergency room department doctor and when I went in there they brought it they heard that I was circumcised and they brought in that medical student and that resident and that social to come and examine me and those types of although I am in a teaching hospital that type of behavior is really unacceptable and so we've now created a Health Center and I feel that at this point now it's been over ten years later I'm at this Delta and the river is about to get into the Mediterranean Sea but one of the things that's so beautiful about a Delta is that you have many roles and one of the things that I've realized as a as an educator is that I am many of many roles so I am a mother of a beautiful seven-year-old daughter I am a sister and aunt I am a teacher at the school I teach medical students and residents I am a student myself because every day I try to learn from my colleagues and my students and in fact my nephews but one of which is a brown student here but I think that in general weird I am now at this Delta where I am doing and juggling many different things and eager to get to the ocean where oh my gosh we haven't even gotten to the ocean where there's all of the sea and underneath the sea and we could scuba dive and see all these new plants and and fish so I guess the message I'm trying to give is that it is a life learning experience we do meander it's okay to meander and we do go through phases where we get stuck and it's okay to get stuck but there are other times where we thrive and we try to learn every day thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 109,123

Keywords: ted x, English, Medicine, tedx talks, ted talks, Women, tedx talk, TEDxBrownUniversity, \Public Health\, ted talk, tedx, ted, United States (Country), Liberal Education, Education

Id: Q4sh5bHLi8I

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 21 2012