[The faces behind the numbers...]

Scenes around Mission Hill taken by A. A. Babar

Every time I see someone digging through our trash, I am struck with a mixture of shame, awkwardness, empathy, and perplexity. A mixture dissolved in irony.

There are homeless people all over the world—people whose survival is a daily struggle, people who do not have food nor water, people whose lives are vulnerable to all sorts of physical and mental harm. But here, in Roxbury—just a hop, skip, and a jump from some of the world’s greatest educational institutions, hospitals, developments—it seems to be such a contradiction to witness such immediate poverty in the midst of such wealth.

I witnessed this semi-collision of worlds a few days ago, when dignitaries—namely the Presidents of the United States—sat together to commemorate the legacy left by Ted Kennedy in the Basilica just a few blocks down. Although I have lived in Roxbury for only a year, I was struck for one of the first times with a certain sense of pride to be a part of a community where something seemingly quick and powerful happened within such diversity. Diversity of power, skin-shades, wealth, and experience.

It reminds me why I’m here in the first place, burying my head in numbers, formulas, words I can not/nor care to pronounce. I guess you could say that I am one of those “social epi” people out to “bridge the gaps”. While the books guilt-trip me into reading just one more page, I am obligated to also take my head out of the sand, and to open my eyes to see the life that is happening all around me.

To ignore the faces behind these numbers drowning in statistical vacuums would be fatal. We owe it to those who have fought before us--some silently, some loudly--proclaiming the need to address the disparities between rich and poor. Between black and white. And between the powerful and powerless.

Amenah A. Babar, MPH
SD Student
Society, Human Development, and Health
Co-Editor in Chief

Welcome Back!

Classes began today for Harvard students from Longwood to Cambridge. While many students, including me, are still figuring out what courses to take for the next 8-16 weeks, I sense a lot of energy and excitement brewing around campus. This is a historic moment for those of us in public health. I am reminded of this constantly by the announcements in the daily Student News about town hall meeting road trips and rallys to discuss health care reform, as well as the frequent headline stories of the Boston Globe and New York Times.

I am certain that health reform will be a topic in many of our classes (whether taken here or at the Kennedy School), and I hope that this blog can inspire and be a forum for student-led discussion.

There lots of new faces at HSPH who will likely contribute great ideas, experiences, and lessons to the classroom discussions here at school. I hope that this blog can be a forum that expands the classroom beyond Kresge and FXB and makes them available for a wider audience of people interested in public health at Harvard.

So I pose this question to you (whomever you are...)

What are you looking forward to this year (or semester) at HSPH?

[letter from the editor]

Greetings HSPH Community!

In 2004, a college friend invited me to become one of the first Carls to join the small facebook community thriving online. Five years later, the world and your Mother are on facebook—a virtual society that boasts of more than 250 million people. And now, in this same digital world, we can even follow Presidential thoughts by the minute through twitter, and are loaded with more online news than you could shake a DAG at. Oh, and let’s not forget good ol’ youtube—watching your favorite comedian at two in the morning could not be made easier. Regardless of where you are on the planet, the internet is simply changing the way we communicate, socialize, see, hear, and think.

It’s literally the world at your fingertips.

As I was reflecting on my first year here at HSPH, amid the hustle and bustle of graduate life, I had the suspicious feeling that something was glaringly missing in my experience. From discussions with my fellow classmates and friends, we came to realize that we were missing that good old fashion debate outside of class on whether Obama’s health care plan would really fly, or that conversation on what people think really went down during the Gates-Crowley exchange. We were missing the chance to share our experiences as students hopping across the globe—learning about health, promoting health, and living health. We were missing that critical dialogue with people outside of our inner circle—with whom we eat lunch and dinner with everyday, compare SAS code with for the same course, and with whom we share the same political views. So, I thought, why not take it to this so-called free “world at your fingertips?”

Hence, the eConnections blog was birthed. The Student Advisory Committee for the Health Communications Concentration (SAC-HCC) has developed this space to provide you—members of the HSPH community—a platform to voice perspectives on public health topics, experiences at HSPH, internships, opinions on public health news events and policy, and to creatively use media (through video, podcasts, photos, music, and digital art) to promote health. We believe promoting health communication is critical to progress in the health arena, and we believe this virtual exchange will be an essential part of the HSPH experience.

So here it is. Your spot in the digital world to voice your opinions. To be real. Honest. And upfront. With friends, allies, opponents, and strangers. If not now, when?

Amenah A. Babar, MPH

SD Student

Society, Human Development, and Health

Co-Editor in Chief