Simin Marefat
Take a pin, stick it in a map of the world and chances are Simin Marefat has been there. A San Francisco nurse and health care volunteer, she's been to 62 countries - mostly in the Third World. She's fed children and changed diapers in Rwandan orphanages. Delivered babies in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Educated sex workers on HIV prevention in Thailand. Vaccinated children in Pakistani refugee camps. Taught EKG and the care of open-heart patients in her native Iran.
Usually she travels alone and plans nothing in advance. "I would just go and I'd be like, 'I'm a nurse practicing in the United States. I'm here to offer my services.' And they would put me to work."
Today, Marefat is a master’s degree candidate in health policy at the UCSF School of Nursing. During her busiest travel years, she was a per-diem nurse at UCSF and could cluster her shifts and travel often. "I would leave the country every three months and go for, like, a month or six weeks at a time," Marefat, 33, says in the hillside home she bought two years ago in San Francisco's Ingleside district.
Wherever she went, she saw enormous need and a huge deficit of resources. For a long time, Marefat says, she hopscotched the globe: Mali and Cameroon, February 2000; Costa Rica, Honduras and Panama, May 2000; Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, March 2001; Cuba, October 2003; Vietnam, December 2003; Chile, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, March 2004; Croatia and Slovenia, August 2006.
"I've traveled the world by myself," says Marefat, who lived in Iran until age 11. "A Middle Eastern woman does not do that."
"She's unstoppable," says her brother Bobby, an ophthalmologist in Topeka, Kan. "Do I worry about her? Yes. Do I try to talk her out of it? Absolutely not, because this is what she loves - it gets her juices flowing."
Marefat is at her dining table, wearing jeans and a black blouse, trying to explain her commitment to the overlooked. "I'm most fulfilled when I know I've helped somebody else," she says. "When I see someone without basic health and education, without a supportive family, I feel a connection. We're all cells of one body."
More than any other country, Rwanda profoundly affected Marefat. In February 2005, 11 years after 800,000 Rwandans were killed in a government-directed genocide that lasted 100 days, Marefat went to the capital, Kigali. She worked in refugee camps and met orphans who'd seen their parents, mostly Tutsis, hacked to death by machete; children who'd hidden in trees during the slaughter and later walked through villages scattered with body parts; children who survived, went to school and longed for a better life.
According to recent figures, there are 43 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, which lost 10 percent of its population in the genocide, and now has close to 10 million people, there are 600,000 orphans - mostly from the genocide, many also from AIDS and malaria.
In Kigali, Marefat met Oliver Rothschild, a Yale Medical School student who in 2004 founded Orphans of Rwanda with his friend Dai Ellis, a Yale Law School grad who directs the Drug Access Team for the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative. Rothschild, 27, took Marefat to an orphanage called Gisimba Memorial Center - one of the locations, like the Hotel des Milles Collines portrayed in "Hotel Rwanda," that housed and protected Tutsis and moderate Hutus from extremist Hutu militia groups during the genocide.
"I saw the children they were supporting," she says. "The children were not getting health care and when I came home I decided to raise money to provide heath care for them."
Marefat had never organized a benefit before, but in June 2006 she gathered dozens of friends and UCSF colleagues at the Photography Center in Duboce Park. She solicited donations of food and wine from local restaurants, and held a silent auction of photographs taken by her and other photographers. The benefit raised $14,000.
The proceeds helped Orphans of Rwanda to build a health clinic at Gisimba Memorial Center, which Marefat visited in June. "It was wonderful for me to see where the money went, to know that they had done the right thing with it. The children all have health cards with their pictures and vaccinations and medications. They have a nurse who provides for them. The children call her 'Ma-Ma.' They have no parents and she is so compassionate toward them. They love the fact that she hugs them and takes care of them."
In Kigali - a city built on terraced hills, surrounded by banana trees, tea and coffee plantations and eucalyptus - Marefat stayed in the home of Shirley Randell, an Australian woman working on gender-equality and governance issues for the Netherlands Development Agency. She befriended Eustache, the guard at Randell's house, and arranged for his epileptic daughter, who'd been misdiagnosed as having mental illness, to be put on the right medication.
Wherever she went, people were barely getting by. An orphaned brother and sister caught her eye one day - they were living in a ditch under a driveway - so she took them home, bathed them, fed them and arranged for their adoption.
She took an interest in Jackson, one of the government-licensed moto (motor scooter) drivers who function as cabbies, and hired him to drive her to work each morning. Jackson speaks Kinyarwanda, the Rwandan national language, but Marefat learned through a translator that he lived with a woman and their child but wasn't married. He lacked the money to pay for a dowry. "You have to give the woman's family something, either buying them a chicken or a goat or a cow. So I ended up buying him a goat. I paid $50 for it."
At summer's end, Marefat says, she'd spent $5,000 helping the various people she met. "After, like, being there two months I'm thinking to myself, 'Oh my God, I have a home. I have responsibilities. I can't just shell out money.' It's like, 'When do I stop?' You see these people and you want to do more and more."
In the 14 years since the Rwandan genocide, dozens of international service organizations have worked to heal and rebuild the tiny nation, among them Population Services International, Family Health International, Women Waging Peace and CARE. The Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS Initiative is working with Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health, an international health and social justice organization, to upgrade the country's health care system and stem the rate of HIV infection. In 2005 they rebuilt Rwinkwavu Hospital, a derelict facility in southern Rwanda that lacked water and electricity.
Orphans of Rwanda is one of many NGOs and nonprofits trying to rebuild the country, but it's the only one raising scholarship money to send Rwandan orphans to university. Michael Brotchner, 34, is the organization's New York-based executive director. Like Marefat, he's whip-smart, speaks rapidly and exudes an urgency and commitment that seem to say, "OK, let's do it ... now!"
"I met Simin in Kigali last summer, over lunch at somebody's house," Brotchner said during a visit to San Francisco. "I'd heard all about her, this great volunteer who did all this great stuff. And when I met her I said, 'Oh! You're the famous Simin.' First of all she shows me her photos. I honestly think she is the best non-professional photographer I've ever seen. Just ridiculously good.
"I said to her, 'Simin, let's do another event in San Francisco,' and she said, 'Sign me up.' " Marefat spearheaded a second ORI benefit, held in November at the Herbst Exhibition Hall in the Presidio, where the guest speaker was Farmer, who is also an infectious disease specialist, and the subject of Tracy Kidder's book "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World." Four hundred people attended, Marefat's photographs were again auctioned and the benefit raised $18,000.
That amount will cover tuition for nearly half of the recently selected 68 ORI scholarship students who started school last month. In addition to tuition, which runs approximately $550 per student per year, an ORI scholarship includes housing expenses and health care, a monthly living stipend and computer and language training.
"We send extremely talented orphans to college and in one sense that's great for them as individuals," Brotchner says. "In a larger sense, we're trying to build human capital in Rwanda. One in 200 Rwandans go to college and this country is trying to go from an agricultural economy to a modern knowledge-based economy. And they're not going to be able to do that without getting these highly trained individuals. So we're taking the most vulnerable people in society and giving them a chance to build a future in their country."
"She's extremely dedicated," Brotchner says of Marefat. "I think she sees the big-picture, policy, macro stuff. But she's also very, very interested in the individual lives of the students. "
She's also energetic - amazingly so. "All of Simin's friends have stories about phone calls you get where she's gathered all this information for you and leaves it on your voicemail," says Julie Cuccia, a UCSF nurse and friend who joined Marefat in Rwanda last summer.
Usually she travels alone and plans nothing in advance. "I would just go and I'd be like, 'I'm a nurse practicing in the United States. I'm here to offer my services.' And they would put me to work."
Today, Marefat is a master’s degree candidate in health policy at the UCSF School of Nursing. During her busiest travel years, she was a per-diem nurse at UCSF and could cluster her shifts and travel often. "I would leave the country every three months and go for, like, a month or six weeks at a time," Marefat, 33, says in the hillside home she bought two years ago in San Francisco's Ingleside district.
Wherever she went, she saw enormous need and a huge deficit of resources. For a long time, Marefat says, she hopscotched the globe: Mali and Cameroon, February 2000; Costa Rica, Honduras and Panama, May 2000; Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, March 2001; Cuba, October 2003; Vietnam, December 2003; Chile, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, March 2004; Croatia and Slovenia, August 2006.
"I've traveled the world by myself," says Marefat, who lived in Iran until age 11. "A Middle Eastern woman does not do that."
"She's unstoppable," says her brother Bobby, an ophthalmologist in Topeka, Kan. "Do I worry about her? Yes. Do I try to talk her out of it? Absolutely not, because this is what she loves - it gets her juices flowing."
Marefat is at her dining table, wearing jeans and a black blouse, trying to explain her commitment to the overlooked. "I'm most fulfilled when I know I've helped somebody else," she says. "When I see someone without basic health and education, without a supportive family, I feel a connection. We're all cells of one body."
More than any other country, Rwanda profoundly affected Marefat. In February 2005, 11 years after 800,000 Rwandans were killed in a government-directed genocide that lasted 100 days, Marefat went to the capital, Kigali. She worked in refugee camps and met orphans who'd seen their parents, mostly Tutsis, hacked to death by machete; children who'd hidden in trees during the slaughter and later walked through villages scattered with body parts; children who survived, went to school and longed for a better life.
According to recent figures, there are 43 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, which lost 10 percent of its population in the genocide, and now has close to 10 million people, there are 600,000 orphans - mostly from the genocide, many also from AIDS and malaria.
In Kigali, Marefat met Oliver Rothschild, a Yale Medical School student who in 2004 founded Orphans of Rwanda with his friend Dai Ellis, a Yale Law School grad who directs the Drug Access Team for the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative. Rothschild, 27, took Marefat to an orphanage called Gisimba Memorial Center - one of the locations, like the Hotel des Milles Collines portrayed in "Hotel Rwanda," that housed and protected Tutsis and moderate Hutus from extremist Hutu militia groups during the genocide.
"I saw the children they were supporting," she says. "The children were not getting health care and when I came home I decided to raise money to provide heath care for them."
Marefat had never organized a benefit before, but in June 2006 she gathered dozens of friends and UCSF colleagues at the Photography Center in Duboce Park. She solicited donations of food and wine from local restaurants, and held a silent auction of photographs taken by her and other photographers. The benefit raised $14,000.
The proceeds helped Orphans of Rwanda to build a health clinic at Gisimba Memorial Center, which Marefat visited in June. "It was wonderful for me to see where the money went, to know that they had done the right thing with it. The children all have health cards with their pictures and vaccinations and medications. They have a nurse who provides for them. The children call her 'Ma-Ma.' They have no parents and she is so compassionate toward them. They love the fact that she hugs them and takes care of them."
In Kigali - a city built on terraced hills, surrounded by banana trees, tea and coffee plantations and eucalyptus - Marefat stayed in the home of Shirley Randell, an Australian woman working on gender-equality and governance issues for the Netherlands Development Agency. She befriended Eustache, the guard at Randell's house, and arranged for his epileptic daughter, who'd been misdiagnosed as having mental illness, to be put on the right medication.
Wherever she went, people were barely getting by. An orphaned brother and sister caught her eye one day - they were living in a ditch under a driveway - so she took them home, bathed them, fed them and arranged for their adoption.
She took an interest in Jackson, one of the government-licensed moto (motor scooter) drivers who function as cabbies, and hired him to drive her to work each morning. Jackson speaks Kinyarwanda, the Rwandan national language, but Marefat learned through a translator that he lived with a woman and their child but wasn't married. He lacked the money to pay for a dowry. "You have to give the woman's family something, either buying them a chicken or a goat or a cow. So I ended up buying him a goat. I paid $50 for it."
At summer's end, Marefat says, she'd spent $5,000 helping the various people she met. "After, like, being there two months I'm thinking to myself, 'Oh my God, I have a home. I have responsibilities. I can't just shell out money.' It's like, 'When do I stop?' You see these people and you want to do more and more."
In the 14 years since the Rwandan genocide, dozens of international service organizations have worked to heal and rebuild the tiny nation, among them Population Services International, Family Health International, Women Waging Peace and CARE. The Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS Initiative is working with Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health, an international health and social justice organization, to upgrade the country's health care system and stem the rate of HIV infection. In 2005 they rebuilt Rwinkwavu Hospital, a derelict facility in southern Rwanda that lacked water and electricity.
Orphans of Rwanda is one of many NGOs and nonprofits trying to rebuild the country, but it's the only one raising scholarship money to send Rwandan orphans to university. Michael Brotchner, 34, is the organization's New York-based executive director. Like Marefat, he's whip-smart, speaks rapidly and exudes an urgency and commitment that seem to say, "OK, let's do it ... now!"
"I met Simin in Kigali last summer, over lunch at somebody's house," Brotchner said during a visit to San Francisco. "I'd heard all about her, this great volunteer who did all this great stuff. And when I met her I said, 'Oh! You're the famous Simin.' First of all she shows me her photos. I honestly think she is the best non-professional photographer I've ever seen. Just ridiculously good.
"I said to her, 'Simin, let's do another event in San Francisco,' and she said, 'Sign me up.' " Marefat spearheaded a second ORI benefit, held in November at the Herbst Exhibition Hall in the Presidio, where the guest speaker was Farmer, who is also an infectious disease specialist, and the subject of Tracy Kidder's book "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World." Four hundred people attended, Marefat's photographs were again auctioned and the benefit raised $18,000.
That amount will cover tuition for nearly half of the recently selected 68 ORI scholarship students who started school last month. In addition to tuition, which runs approximately $550 per student per year, an ORI scholarship includes housing expenses and health care, a monthly living stipend and computer and language training.
"We send extremely talented orphans to college and in one sense that's great for them as individuals," Brotchner says. "In a larger sense, we're trying to build human capital in Rwanda. One in 200 Rwandans go to college and this country is trying to go from an agricultural economy to a modern knowledge-based economy. And they're not going to be able to do that without getting these highly trained individuals. So we're taking the most vulnerable people in society and giving them a chance to build a future in their country."
"She's extremely dedicated," Brotchner says of Marefat. "I think she sees the big-picture, policy, macro stuff. But she's also very, very interested in the individual lives of the students. "
She's also energetic - amazingly so. "All of Simin's friends have stories about phone calls you get where she's gathered all this information for you and leaves it on your voicemail," says Julie Cuccia, a UCSF nurse and friend who joined Marefat in Rwanda last summer.
Comment