Early childhood & Family BR: Tell me about your childhood, when and where you were born.
SJ: I was born in Richmond Virginia in 1977…. and…..I moved to Tulsa Oklahoma, with my family, I believe in…..oh gosh, probably 1979-or 1980 and that’s really where I spent my formative years growing up in Tulsa Oklahoma, until I was 18 and then I left to go to Hollins.
BR: Well, tell me some about your family...
SJ: Ok, well my parents lets see, my mother is an English teacher, a high school English teacher, my father is retired but he was… a… professor in a medical school...
BR: Wow…
SJ: Let’s see they divorced when I was about 6. My mom remarried a man who’s a police office and my dad remarried a woman who I guess he meet who was working in the biology lab at the university. She and my dad are both retired but by my mom and my step dad are still working and I have an older brother who is... 34 and who is a musician and I have a younger sister who is 18 and she was born when I was 12 or 13 years old, there was a large age difference between me and my younger sister and who I was partially responsible for raising when she was a child….. SJ: ….so I did a lot of care for her bathing, feeding, dressing, driving around, picking up, that kind of stuff…..
BR: And do you think that this aspect of your family life and the jobs that your parents have chosen maybe helped you go toward social change work?
SJ: I think so, both of my parents where missionary kids, my father grew up in Nigeria and Africa and he was born there and lived there till he was 15 years old, and then my mother she was born and raised in India, and she was a missionary kid there and actually my grandfather, great grandfather, and great great grandmother all lived in India as well and worked as missionaries.
BR: Wow!
SJ: And so I had that, that sort of heritage of service in my family, and I don’t think I ever really realized that that’s what it was, that it was anything different from any one else's family. I think when you grow up in a service family you know at least for me growing up in a service family, I never really called it service it’s just what we did. We never woke up in the morning and said ok we are going to go out and serve people, you know it was just kind of a subconscious thing that you do. It wasn’t until I got older and watched the different life paths that so many of my friends chose, that I realized that those two things are different and weird about me. (Sarah on how she felt about taking care of a younger sibling) SJ: I helped out a lot, at the time I didn’t really think anything of it. It was just a responsibility.
BR: Right
SJ: You know, when you’re a kid, who was it I think it was Maya Angelo who said that, some thing along the lines of, kid’s just do things because they don’t realize there is any alternative. I didn’t see it as, and I still don’t see it as a bad thing. I see it as a great blessing, you know when I was teaching high school I realized that many of my students who were emotionally and behaviorally troubled, one of the things that they have in common is that they have absolutely no responsibility in the family.
SJ: And consequently when people feel purposeless they act out or they make bad decisions because they have nothing else to do.
SJ: So I think of it as a good thing. I think it was a motivator. And now it's interesting, I realize that I have all this knowledge about caring for a baby that most people who haven’t had children don’t have. But I think of it as a really good thing. And my little sister is consequently graduating from high school and she has applied to Hollins. Schooling at Hollins BR: So do you think that your education at Hollins has helped you...is it different coming from a women’s only education?
SJ: I think at the time I chose to go to Hollins, I didn’t know that I needed to go to a women’s college, and I just kind of chose it because I wanted to study creative writing and it was a good program, so I went there. And I really found that I needed to be at a women’s college...
SJ: In what way... I think I just needed an environment that I could build my confidence, and be nurtured for four years...yeah so definetly, it was good for me.
SJ: And that’s kind of how I feel about what I’m doing right now, learning to be a nurse practitioner, it’s not like a Hollins education in that’s it’s not that fun liberal education, but I feel like everything I got at Hollins, I’ve brought with me….I mean the people that I see in the program who only have a professional education, this may sound horrible, but they really don’t strike me as intelligent people. There is something that’s just missing from them and it’s not their fault that they weren’t afforded a broad education. When you get out in the workplace you can definitely tell the difference between the people who have a broad education and who doesn’t…and I think particularly in the health care field you get a lot of narrow people, who have only really done one thing. You know some physicians have been working to become physicians since they were 18.
(Activities while at Hollins)
BR: What kind of organizations where you involved in while you were at Hollins?
SJ: Well let’s see. My freshman year I was just very active in attending all of the Grapheon readings and all of the English department reading and the all of the chapel services and communion services. Then my sophomore year I was asked by the woman who was a year ahead of me to be the president of Grapheon. So my sophomore year I was the president of Grapheon, and I ran all of the English department, you know the student readings?
BR: Mmhmm...
SJ: And then my junior year I went to
Fuld Fellowship from Emory
S J: So I have a $120,000 worth of free education at Emory.
BR: Wow!
SJ: It’s a fellowship called the Fuld Fellowship and it’s given to four people in each incoming class that have some kind of history working with the underserved population and then you continue working with the underserved population.
BR: Wow!
SJ: Yeah, so I’m really lucky in that. Definitely, and lucky that Emory has all these different kinds of programs…because I came in thinking that I wanted to be a midwife and then really changed...
BR: Right...
SJ: Largely because I think midwifery is too specific. You know you really care specifically for the pregnant and laboring woman and it just felt too narrow to me. I wanted to be able to provide full scope family practice care. With the degree that I’m getting now, I can do anything that a family doctor can do except deliver babies that’s the one thing that we really don’t do. So it really allows me to provide primary care to the entire family; children, adults, old people, pregnant women, everything.
BR: Wow, that very exciting!
SJ: Yeah it’s great!
|