 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us, and yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote and 189 years for black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years, depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white, life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness. So on this show, you are going to meet people who are making it possible to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, people today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hello, my name is Michael Jacoby Brown. I'm your host where we hold these truths. And today, thanks to the power of the Internet and Katie Chang at Arlington Community Media, we are able to host Noreen Dunn, a colleague and friend of mine and organizer and educator from Darjeeling, India, over thousands and thousands of miles away from Boston. So Noreen, can you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and where you gained your values? Sure. I'll do it, as you said. I'll do a quick background, which is a bit long. I was born and brought up in Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains northeast in India. I am, as some could say, a Himalayan cocktail with Nepalese, Sycamese, Irish ethnicity, hence my name Noreen Dunn, causing a little bit of confusion in India and abroad, especially when they see my Asian face, my Indian passport, and my Irish name. So it's very anglicized, so people don't understand. However, my comfort zone, Mike and Katie, is Darjeeling because it is a cosmopolitan crucible of ethnicity, religion, caste, color, and class. Earlier on, you were saying that it's poor, but the kinds of education institutions that the Christian missionary started in our mountains, all the neighboring royal families sent their children to study here, Bhutan, Nepal, Sycam, Burma, all of them sent their children to us, to our school. So many of them were our class friends. I was born into a Christian Protestant family, educated by Irish Roman Catholic nuns in Loretto Convent Darjeeling and Canadian Jesuit priests in St. Joseph's College Darjeeling. After getting my BA in English honors in the college here, I got my first master's degree in English literature in the extreme west of India in a place called the University of Bombay because we were having tremendous Nuxalite problems. And so I went there. Then I was very fortunate to get a scholarship to the United Kingdom, particularly to Leeds University to get my second master's degree in phonetics and linguistics. And then with God's grace, I got my third scholarship to go to the Harvard Kennedy School to get my third master's degree in public administration. Soon after I graduated from Bombay University, I was hired by the Jesuits into the same college that I studied in St. Joseph's. That is where I taught undergrad students English language and literature for 37 years. And then I took on for 10 years more, 10 to 11 years, post-grad English. And then I decided to retire from formal teaching. I then continued mentoring my ex-students who now became teachers in government institutions for underprivileged children in our district. Why? Because they kept in touch with me and I could hear the discouragement in their voices. And when I visited them, I understood that they needed an input in quality, both in their teaching as well as in the students' learning. Because there was no encouragement, no support, no infrastructure. I mean, it was better than nothing, but it wasn't so good. And I realized that we had to create an open, free, creative, compassionate person and this wasn't it. So I loved that challenge. Meanwhile, I continued to be, as you know, Michael, the treasurer and founding trustee in the nonprofit that we started 51 years ago, Hayden Hall. And it was started by my English teacher, a Canadian Jesuit priest called Father Burns from Montreal, Canada. This was a natural offsuit of the Jesuit principle of opting for the poor in whatever we do and creating men and women for others in our educational institutions. So as to manage and sustain these initiatives by training and conscientizing the real stakeholders in our world. And let's face it, two-thirds of our world is poor. So I went with the Jesuit principle. And Hayden Hall is now celebrated 50 years, now we're 51 years old. And we continue to work for the poor and underprivileged, especially women and children, both in the rural and urban areas of our district. And our vision still remains, at least our mission statement says, a healthy, well-informed, self-reliant and self-transforming community. And our mission is to respond to those needs with quality community and individual health care and nutrition and for children to gain access to and complete school through supplementary health services. And we help cultivate a culture of entrepreneurship, taking a risk for the poor is very difficult and sustainability of their livelihoods. As you might have seen on TV, such people are the ones that get the butt end of pandemics like us. And for 51 years, I have experienced, not for myself personally, but I have seen the pandemic of poverty. In the year 1969, Hayden Hall began with no money, no professional trained staff, just two of us, students of Father Burns, who then became teachers. And with the single-minded determination of helping the poor women and children of our hill communities, because they were the most vulnerable. So primary health and primary education was our major target. The then team looked at the empowerment of women in our community. And the utmost need of the R was that, and we started programs like mother-in-child health care and livelihood centers for income generation, since these mothers were the main breadwinners in most cases. Hayden Hall then expanded from the urban areas to the rural areas, because the infrastructure is even worse. There are hardly any roads. If you want to really be trim and fit, come and walk with us. The work never stopped. And now, 51 years later, with improved technology, our villages now have cell phones. In the old days, I was thinking of smoke signals, but now they have cell phones, enhanced skills and infrastructure, but with the same vision of enabling women. But now, Mike, they are not only the recipients, but also the change makers in their lives. We at the moment have about 48 study centers, 14 sub-centers, 66 women community workers, community development workers, 76 rural teachers, 28 female entrepreneurs. And these are the sustained implementers of our mission statement, which is human development through love and service. And so as we look at the work we do now, we see that 80% of the change makers are female leaders who are a group of committed, well-informed and skilled women willing to take risks to make, you know, to bring about the change Hayden Hall believed in and still believes in. If you see them, you'll think they're just quote unquote ordinary women, you know, but they're just great people. That's why the leadership course in Harvard and in other places should include such people. Can you tell us a little more about where you got your values to do this wonderful work, this important work? Well, I thought and thought about it and then I realized from a lot of people, my God-fearing parents, my family, we're a family of six, my faith, my teachers, especially Father Burns, who helped to protect, I suppose, staff my potential, my college friends, my school friends, the NGO Hayden Hall, my subject English, American poetry, Hayden Hall above all, and the poor and underprivileged that I work for and with. Because Hayden Hall grounded me, you know, I could be traveling to Harvard, even though let me tell you, Michael, most people don't even know where it is. But you know, it was Hayden Hall that kept me. So, but my later degrees across the world gave me a greater appreciation of the differences in economic, political, and social lifestyles of different peoples of India and the world. And thus, I understood in a real sense the great divide of the developed and the developing world, what some people call the haves and the have-nots. Right. Can you tell us something about what life is like? You said there's very little infrastructure. That's a big word here. We think about roads and bridges. When you describe the situation in Darjeeling and northeast in India, can you describe what it's like so people who are not there and may never be there could actually understand? Yeah. Well, you know, it's one thing to be literate, but in order to understand, even like given even now during our pandemic, to be able to get vaccinated, you know, one has to have contacts. One has to know where to go. One has to handle the fears of people about vaccines. You know, there are so many little things that we take for granted. And because we have Google, perhaps we have friends that we can contact, but they don't. So that was one. The other thing is language. Now, English, as you know, is the universal language of the world and of India, though some people would not want to accept that, but it is. And for many people, it's very difficult to handle that. But more importantly, if you're poor, most people don't even pay attention to you unless you're voting. And so that is where sometimes intervention from our part comes in. And so that has been the work of Hayden Hall to empower these people so that they can speak up and speak out. Now, as I said in one of my videos in Harvard, that I was so intimidated by coming to Harvard that I couldn't even ask questions of my teachers, you know, you felt that way. So you can imagine with all my degrees, if I felt like that, my circumstances perhaps coming from a very small town, that may have influenced, you can imagine people who are so much more, you know, who have greater difficulties than I have. Well, you mentioned you have been able to use the word empower many poor people, primarily women, you said. Can you tell us a little bit about what you did actually to develop their leadership? You also described that most of those women are the breadwinners. I'm interested to know the specifics of what you did because that's something that is universal, whether they're poor people in Boston or poor people in India. A lot of the work of organizing is, as you say, providing people a sense of power. What did you specifically do? And how did you sustain that work? Well, let me respond in a sort of indirect way. I was also including my students who are not all rich just because they came to a Jesuit college. And so most of the time, by just teaching them how to understand and basically communicate in English, help to empower them. And by empowering them and also trying to encourage them to think of others less fortunate than them. That was part of my empowering and sharing that empowerment with even poorer people, people less privileged than them. But my students were no less underprivileged because I taught in the arts department and a lot of them really had tremendous disadvantages. So that is one of the reasons why sometimes I feel when we have reflections on global warming, sociopolitical policies, even our pandemics protocols like social distancing and washing your hands and all these things. These I think are almost luxuries for our people who have sometimes 10 by 12 accommodation, have very poor access to water, have to think of living from day to day. And in that sense, I found that I had by teaching the students that freed them, that empowered them. Now in the last 51 years in Hayden Hall in this NGO, we have been able to do that with four or five generations of people by giving them community housing. At least they have a small house to themselves. They have livelihood skills like weaving, sewing, knitting, working with bamboo, developing mushrooms. And they've had preventive health care, daycare, fresh, fresh facilities for coolly mothers who carry loads on their back or chip stones. Just to keep their children safe and nutritious and warm environment was in itself so empowering. We were the first to start a daycare center for working mothers and then paramedic training for the extension workers in the villages, adult literacy for the adults, preschool and after school education, giving scholarships for such children in neighborhood schools. And this is all we were doing all this while I was doing full-time work in St. Joseph's because we were doing this for free and I needed to support myself too and my family. So when people talk about social work as if it's a glamorous job, I keep telling them it's not just nine to five, it's not all that is full-time, it's not just overtime, it's all the time. And so I helped my students and others from the community also at that time, Mike, with drug and alcohol rehabilitation. And now we are talking about adolescent depression because of the pandemic. And so so many of the youngsters that we've helped have now continued NA narcotics anonymous and alcoholics anonymous centers across the district. And again, we have a lot of this emotional support that we need to give now to children who have either lost a parent or whose parents are sick in hospital or who are going through online classes that are hardly happening because they have no internet tools. So much of this has to now be incorporated. So we are creating that infrastructure, Mike. And I know we've made a lot of mistakes, but because we've had this previous infrastructure that has helped us gain the trust of the people. And because I was a teacher for so long, that helps a great deal because in our language Nepali, teachers are called Guru Amma if you're female and Guru Babu if you're male, meaning you're a teacher, but you're a mother, you're a teacher, you're also a father. And that aspect is not forgotten by the community. So all of this has helped us develop infrastructure. Now, unfortunately, sometimes political parties and other vested parties want to piggyback on us. And I don't mind, but I do not like any political nuances in what we do. So that's why I continue to mentor my students hoping that they will pass this on to their children, to their underprivileged. So I just personally feel that's it. That's the kind of infrastructure. That's wonderful. Can you tell us a little bit more how you supported this work? You talked about entrepreneurship and providing jobs for people. You talked about developing a daycare center. Was that done with volunteers or how did you do that? Or did you pay people, made money? What? In the beginning, it was volunteers, there were two of us volunteers, but later we took on staff at very low cost. I even feel that I feel embarrassed by how much we paid, but we never had the money. And somehow they were inspired to do this kind of work. So we got them from the middle class, the lower middle class of my students. And so they joined us as staff and they did terrific work. Now, the daycare center, same thing. We had volunteers who came from abroad to help us and they taught us Montessori methods, which is perhaps one of the best, best methods that could be used even at tertiary level because you're teaching students at their pace. You're profiling the students, which most teachers never do. You are teaching by having fun. You are listening to them. It's, you know, Madame Montessori may have been writing in the 19th century for physically and mentally challenged children, but it sure works today. Well, this is inspiring to hear what you've done with women with very, very low income people. Can you tell us, because I think the lessons, whether they're in India or in Boston, are pretty universal about how you do that. Talking about a teacher is also a mother or a father, someone that cares more than just the intellectual development of a person, but the whole person, I think that's an important part of being a teacher. Can you tell us over the many decades you've been doing this, what are some of the lessons you would have for other people that want to be teachers and people that would really empower poor people? What have you learned through all your work and experience there that would apply, I think, universally? Oh, lots. Let me say in the field of education, I personally feel that educationally, Michael, particularly effective education, is a leveler and it powers you to accept life as a playing field, even in a place like the Harvard Kennedy School. I'll give you my example, I think it was 2008 when Dean Elwood invited me to share the forum platform in the Kennedy School with two other classmates, one Jackie Weatherspoon, who at that time was the state representative for the state of New Hampshire, and the other, Jose Maria Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica, an intimidating pair given their national and international experience. Wow. And here was me coming from a college lecturer from a small college in Darjeeling, deputy director of a small non-governmental organization, and I was sharing the platform with these two. But because they were my class friends, because we had had a coffee together many, many times, I was able to do that, but that was unless education reinforces you to believe in who you are and not what position you hold, and to see others for who they are and not the positions they hold, education is not a leveler. In fact, it can make a terrific class distinction. See, hearing your own voice, expressing it in my country without being convicted for sedition, listening to other people's stories, as Anderson Cooper said on CNN today, and also listening to district voices and other people's truths, as President Obama, whom he was interviewing, also said today, you know, I personally feel that my confidence to fundraise abroad came from that. Even when I was often told, Michael, you don't get breaks, you make them. When I asked a big entrepreneur in Montreal, give me a break, that's what he told me. And then I was often told by big corporate heads, you should know the judge, not the law. I was told by Ralph Nadia when I went to see him about the consumer movement that he started and how he handled General Motors. He said, your people are so illiterate, Nori. You know, so then if it wasn't for my education that I got from my little town called Darjeeling and from teachers like Father Burns, I don't think I would have had the confidence to do all these things. And the faith that I have in my God, I really believe that. And so the other thing that I learned in the development field, Michael, was that development of a person or a community, an area, perhaps even a country, I mean that's too big for me, means accountable, incorruptible people. How many leaders today are being accused of corruption and different types of schools. So I believe development means accountable, incorruptible people. It means sustainable strategies, you know, so that includes love, compassion, service that brings about behavioral changes in the stakeholders, not just us. In other words, you know, I feel so tired. Stop selling your ideas only. Start trying to serve us. I think you're right, Noreen. Our time's almost up but I think the point you're making about being of service, being a teacher and in Nepali, it's also being a mother, someone that not only communicates intellectual things, but the values. I think the values that you've inculcated have really been helpful. So we've been really lucky to have Noreen done a teacher and a mother to many, many people in Northeastern India with us today. And we want to thank you, Noreen, and God bless you for all the work you've done. And we look forward to seeing you. Hopefully, I'll be able to... Yeah, sure. Before we end, I'm so sorry, I just want to say this. Hence, wherever I went to fundraise, my mantra, my motto was always help us, help them to help themselves. And you can only do that once you profile either your students or the people that you work for and with. Because as I said to the Kennedy School, it's relationships, my relationships with you, Michael, that change my world more than the ideas and policies we learned. Because human nature never changes. It's the same things happening to a different group of people. And that hopefully is the legacy I've passed on to my students and my friends are my friendships with people like you, Michael. We're blessed to know you. Thank you. And for that, I'm your host, Michael Jacoby Brown. These are We Hold These Truths. And we're very grateful to have Noreen done coming to us all the way from Northeastern India. Good night. I know it's a lot later there. Thank you very much. Okay. God bless you, Michael and Katie.