Having the inner strength to follow a dream when the odds are against you? Vanessa Kerry, the definition is pretty straightforward. It boils down to being prepared.
In the world of global health, she says, that means "strong systems, primary care and the ability to respond." Those are the ideas that will guide her in her new job as special envoy for health resilience at the World Health Organization. It's the latest addition to an impressive resume. Kerry was WHO's first special envoy for climate change and health, is director of global health and climate policy at Harvard School of Public Health and is the founder and CEO of Seed Global Health.
That nonprofit group has been building resilience in lower-resource countries for over a decade, dispatching coaches and mentors to educate and train local healthcare students and practitioners as well as building financial and material resources. Kerry's activism reflects seminal moments from her younger years. In grade school, she decided she wanted to become a doctor.
At age 14, she traveled to Vietnam with her father, former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, and was deeply struck by the poverty she saw. Between her third and fourth years in medical school, she spent time in a hospital in Rwanda. One day she was asked to "be a helping hand" with a woman's labor and delivery, working with a nurse.
Kerry said, "I'm a student." So that was the team — this medical student from the U.S. and a Rwandan nurse. "The mother was pushing, but the baby was not advancing," Kerry remembers. "The shoulder had gotten stuck, and so we needed to do the maneuvers to help to deliver." She tried to remember everything she could from time spent in a "labor rotation a while back." There was no imaging, no specific training either she or the nurse had had for this type of situation.
"We were lucky," she says, "Because what we remembered worked." Mother and child survived. Kerry, now 49, recalls: "I remember walking out of that room thinking, that was extremely distressing — more than that, extremely shocking and terrifying. She could only conclude "this whole system doesn't work." That harrowing delivery was the germ for Seed Global Health.
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