Rev. Gloria White-Hammond delivered the 2006 Russell Lecture in Goddard Chapel last night, discussing her work with disadvantaged women across the world.
White-Hammond's Lecture, titled "A Career in Medicine vs. A Ministry of Healing," was the inspiring tale of her own pursuit of a medical career and then what she feels was her true calling, or "ministry": working with high-risk black females both in South Boston and in the Darfur region in Southern Sudan.
After receiving a bachelor's degree from Boston University, a Doctorate of Medicine from Tufts Medical School and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, White-Hammond said she had her medical career "all mapped out" the way she'd always intended it to be.
But beginning in 1992, after working for over 10 years with young underprivileged women in the South End of Boston, White-Hammond began to feel "quite frustrated" with the fact that medicine wasn't helping her to "change the world" in the way she had originally intended.
She said that she remembers thinking that "no matter how hard I tried, I wasn't making a difference."
Just over 50 percent of White-Hammond's patients graduate high school, and 60 percent of the pregnancies her clinic handles are in women under the age of 18, she said. Many suffer from severe depression and often end up in jail.
After one of her patients was shot and killed on his bike in a drug-dealing incident, two days after his 18th birthday - the first birthday he hadn't spent in jail in four years - she said she looked to the "Cloud of Witnesses," or the saints, for guidance.
This helped her to realize that she "could have kept complaining, or have gotten up and helped myself."
And help herself - and many others - she did. In 1994, she started the program "Do the Write Thing," a creative writing program for high-risk black youth in the Boston area. At the program's outset, only four young black girls attended. Today, the program reaches out to over 500 area adolescents and includes counseling, mentoring, and recreational programs, she said.
White-Hammond cites mentoring as the foundation of the relationships that today's children need with adults. Only this can keep them from depression, she said. "Some kids only have meaningful relationships with their computers today," she said.
White-Hammond next took her "ministry" further from Boston to the Sudan in 2001, a country that has experienced three genocides since 1950 and is now governed by Arab-Muslims who comprise a mere five percent of the population, subjecting the other 95 percent to a violent rule.
Rape, an "instrument of war that horrifies girls and humiliates women and the men who love them," is something the women of Darfur are forced to endure in everyday life, White-Hammond said. A task as simple as collecting firewood around a refugee camp puts women at risk of being raped.
"The men will be killed, and the women simply raped," she said.
White-Hammond is sure that "confronting violence in Sudan will help us confront it everywhere," and she hopes to face "whatever in our cultures that allows the violence to occur."
The solution to violence is education, she said. Yet, of the 16 percent of children in primary school in Sudan, only one in five of those students is a girl. After this realization, in 2002 White-Hammond co-founded "My Sister's Keeper," a women's group that seeks to educate women through and past primary school in Sudan.
Although she views self-education as the most effective solution, White-Hammond also advocates immediate deployment of United Nations peacekeeping forces to Darfur, strengthening the understaffed African Union force, and increasing the humanitarian aid to the region.
Her advice to Tufts students: "Don't just pursue careers, but pursue your lives in the service of the disenfranchised."
