Written by N’dea Moore-Petinak
November 13, 2024
Halfway through my SCU experience, I went on an Immersion in New Orleans as part of an alternative spring break. We spent the week building houses for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Ten years later, there were still victims of a storm that disproportionately affected marginalized groups waiting to return home. Abandoned homes still bore the mark of a hastily spray painted “X” to indicate whether the property had been searched by rescue groups, and how many bodies lay inside. The work we did, accompanied by the harrowing sights of those “X”s was a crash course in empathy… to put yourself in the shoes of another and attempt to feel their pain. But the value of an SCU education is that it asks you to do more than just feel what another human being is feeling; it asks you to do something about it. That coupling is what happens when you combine empathy with social justice.
In the time since that balmy week in the Crescent City, I have lived many places. In each, I have tried to practice empathy when needed. During mys semester spent in Washington, D.C. as a Panetta Congressional Intern, I learned about how policy gets made at the federal level and how it is up to the hardworking staffers of Capitol Hill to remember the constituents of their district and how they feel when they propose legislation to their bosses in the House or the Senate. Congress is supposed to be a voice of the people; a reflection of what the country needs. The next semester, as a study abroad student in Geneva, Switzerland and Rabat, Morocco, I learned about development work and global health policy. My Moroccan host mother, a small in stature but mighty woman, warmly invited me into her home for the week and showed me a community wholly different from my own. Women had fewer rights than they did in my native California, but they were still the anchor of the neighborhood. And health policy, the topic I had come to the country to learn more about, was being used broadly to empower women to engage in family planning on their own terms.
"That day I learned about the connection that the Irish see in the fight for equality—not unlike their own struggle for human rights—with other struggles across the globe."
While completing my master’s degree in Global Health at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, I was surrounded by the pain of the past. For many Irish residents over the age of 30, The Troubles—a violent 30 year conflict between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland fueled by historical grievances—were an all too familiar part of recent national history. But when I traveled to Northern Ireland for the first time I found something I did not expect: radical empathy. On the Peace Wall in Belfast, there are familiar faces in the global struggle against oppression: Mandela, Douglass, King, and Marley. Figures I never expected to see outside of spaces more commonly associated with the African diaspora. However, that day I learned about the connection that the Irish see in the fight for equality—not unlike their own struggle for human rights—with other struggles across the globe.
As with all of my travels and studies across many countries and coast lines, I try to remember the importance of empathy, and the training I received at SCU to do something about it. That is why I chose to pursue advanced studies in public health policy. In my past research, especially in my dissertation, I put myself in the shoes of a single parent working two jobs trying to sign their child up for life saving health insurance, a scared adolescent traumatized by the realistic horror of a school shooter drill, and an American living with a chronic illness through a once in a century pandemic. Now, through a life of public service, I am able to practice empathy and strive to leave the world better than I found it.
Dr. N’dea Moore-Petinak has bachelors degrees in Public Health and Political Science from Santa Clara University (2017) and received a masters in Global Health from Trinity College Dublin (2018). In 2022, Dr. Moore-Petinak completed her doctoral studies at the University of Michigan in the School of Public Health’s Department of Health Management & Policy. Her dissertation focused on the Children’s Health Insurance Program and she is currently a health care analyst for the Government Accountability Office in Washington, D.C.