THE MUSTANG MESSENGER 19 THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
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THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
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"M
y daughter asks me what religion I practice all the time. Usually I have an answer for her, but generally that answer isn't what she's looking for. 'Love,' I tell her. 'I love.'" Dr. Sonita Singh continues, saying, "I see religions as languages to interact with your spiritual self. I don't label myself or anyone else because I believe compassion and caring are universal." Her daughter, Bhakti Singh, is a living testament to her approach to piety. Named after the Hindu pathway to God through intense love and devotion, Bhakti is a daily reminder of her mission as a mother and professional in the public health industry. A member of one of the last La Reine High School graduating classes, the class of 1991, Sonita immersed herself in the wisdoms of Catholicism. While working for the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research (ICDDR) in Bangladesh and wandering through the countryside of India, she adopted the lessons of Hinduism. During a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research excursion to eliminate malaria in economically challenged regions in Gambia, she discovered the teachings of Islam. Today, Sonita is a student of religion, spirituality, manifestation science, and, for good measure, a Doctoral Candidate at Tulane University where she is writing her dissertation on "Multi-Disaster Resilience at the Economic and Social Household Level in Haiti." With a Bachelor's Degree in Cellular Molecular Biology and a Master's Degree in International Health and Development, Sonita possesses a thirst for knowledge that has been facilitated by the academic realm as well as by her work internationally on the forefront of the battle with HIV/AIDS, obesity, malaria, diarrheal diseases, and severe poverty. Her travels throughout Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, as well as her work in her adopted home, New Orleans, have shaped her worldview and fueled her passion to be a catalyst for change not only in her local community, but as far as she can reach personally, professionally, and spiritually. Her first journey, however, involved no traveling to exotic locations or advising foreign cultures, but rather was rooted in her formative upbringing right outside of
20
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
Washington, D.C. The second of four children born to a single mother, Sonita was often in charge of her own household. Her mother, a public high school teacher in Prince George's County, recognized the shortcomings of the public school system and wanted her children to be well educated at a Catholic school, where they, too, could be shaped by faith. From first grade until high school graduation, Sonita and her three sisters went to Catholic schools. As a single mother, however, this meant sacrifice. Sonita remembers her mother working up to four jobs to make house, car, and school payments. "From a very early age, I got it," she said referring to her family's economic situation. "There would be weeks when my mom would work the day shift, the night shift, and whatever shift was in between all week. When she was home, it was all she could do to not fall asleep standing up. I recognized her struggle and sought to help ease her burden." To help, she got a part-time job. "By the time I got to La Reine High School, I had a part-time job and I was raising my two younger sisters when my mom wasn't around," she said. "It was difficult but it was what I had to do." Sonita found balance in her high school, as she was able to decompress among friends and a supportive faculty and staff. "La Reine challenged me to be better academically, personally, and spiritually while supporting me at a time I really needed it," she said. Balancing the life of a high school student who was also a caretaker and provider gave Sonita a more persistent view of what success should entail for her and her sisters. "I realized how much time and effort my mom put into sending us to school, and because of that I refused to get bad grades," she said. "Even at that age, I had a profound economic sense of the sacrifice being undertaken by our mom and I refused to have it squandered." At La Reine, she found opportunity aplenty in the rigorous academic setting, the welcoming spiritual environment, and the encompassing staff and student body. "Even all these years later," she said, "I still have fond memories of my time at La Reine."
The serenity and academic bliss of her high school stood in heavy contrast to the community in which she lived, however. "I was right in the middle of it when crack cocaine hit Washington, D.C. and all the negativity it brought with it when I was growing up," she said. "On an average night, my sisters and I would hear three to four guns shots. We initially had a difficult time sleeping through them, but after a while you just got used to them — because you knew there was nothing to be done about it and you might as well get some sleep." There was an undercurrent of helplessness in her community, as they felt politicians did little to help with the widespread problems of drug abuse and gang violence. "Most of the people who made laws never had the experience of living through them." Rather, cookie-cutter solutions plagued her area, which resulted in higher rates of incarceration in local prisons, but no end to the drug use and murder that plagued the city corners. Despite only being 18 at the time of her acceptance to Tulane, Sonita knew what she wanted from the next phase of her life, albeit not having any idea how she'd go about it. Having been raised with a great love of science by her mother, she wanted to use her collegiate experience to propel herself into the world of medicine and science to help fix some of the problems that disrupted her home community. As an undergraduate student, she majored in Cellular Molecular Biology, and had an opportunity to travel to Ghana for coursework. The trip challenged Sonita's preconceived notions about herself and her upbringing, as for the first time she was greeted by cultures and communities that not only made do with far less than she ever had, but were happier for it. "If I thought I was ever in harm's way growing up, I was truly misinformed," she said. "In Ghana, those who have little are so grateful for everything they do have in life. It was a transformative experience for me." Returning to finish her Bachelor's degree, Sonita felt reinvigorated about her place in the world. As soon as she graduated, she began working in an Anti-Recidivism program in New Orleans. Recidivism refers to a person's relapse into criminal behavior, often after the person receives sanctions or undergoes intervention for a previous crime.
By working in Anti-Recidivism, Sonita strived to keep rehabilitated offenders from returning to their previous lives of crime. While she studied and applied to Medical School, she worked with parolees. Unlike the politicians in her hometown who took pride in shaping laws and messages without visiting the communities affected by them, Sonita made an effort to prevent recidivism based on individual circumstances. "While I was never able to relate to the nature of their crimes, I began to feel that to truly rehabilitate these men and women, I had to take it upon myself to get to know them and their situations personally," she said. And it worked. With an 85 percent success rate, Sonita and her co-workers received the official stamp of approval from the Attorney General of the United States at the time, Janet Reno. The work was a far reach from her molecular biology background, but the program's success as well as her own personal experience inspired Sonita to continue on the broader path of Public Health. She applied to and was accepted into a Master's program at Tulane that focused on International Health and Development with a focus on Infectious Disease and Tropical Medicines. Her program and work took her to Bangladesh where she worked with the ICDDR, but struggled initially. Sent to teach citizens more sanitary practices for food preparation and waste disposal, Sonita initially struggled to explain the necessity behind her teachings. "I thought to myself, 'this will be easy,'" she said. "They'll completely understand that washing hands is important. Never did I stop to consider the fact that these people and cultures had no context for what I was teaching them. How do you teach someone about killing germs if they cannot understand what a germ is? You can't see it, feel it, touch it, or hear it." Rather than focusing on the microbiology aspect of teaching the local citizens, she opted rather to instruct using easily replicable methods for sanitation she'd learned both in an academic setting and in her travels internationally. A short trip turned into almost a year and a half, as she worked in Bangladesh for nearly six months and then traveled around India in search of spiritual guidance. When she returned home to New Orleans, she had studied the
teachings of Hinduism and deepened her spiritual self by seeking pilgrimage in an ashram, a monastic community for spiritual retreat. The next several years brought Sonita her daughter, Bhakti, as well as an opportunity to focus on wellness in her neighboring communities. She had purpose in her work, as well as the drive to make peoples' lives better with results to back her up. In a weight loss program in Mississippi, she pushed nearly 700 participants to lose a combined 4,000 lbs. in the course of several months. With yearly trips abroad to help with various governmental organizations, she began to enjoy a settled career path until, as had become a pattern in her life, she was dealt a sudden change and forced to adapt. She was confronted by nature's fury in 2003, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. While she and her daughter were able to escape unscathed from the natural disaster, the place she called home was the epicenter of need. Her skills in public health were suddenly in the highest demand. She was immediately hired by the Center for Disease Control to help stem the outbreak of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among the refugees of the storm in the aftermath of the hurricane in Mississippi. The storm and loss of infrastructure prevented necessary treatment and access to vital resources to many of its victims, presenting a situation that required quick, decisive action in order to best serve the public's needs. For over two years, Sonita worked to help those who had been irreparably challenged by the storm regain some semblance of return to their previous, more structured lives. "When it came to working with Katrina refugees, poverty was more debilitating than anything else," she said. "Those that were poor generally lacked education which only worsened their cases and, if they had nothing in New Orleans, they had nothing as refugees." Her work with refugees partnered her with Dr. Hannah Gay — a doctor who is on record as being the first to "functionally cure" a child born with HIV. The acclaim and controversy that followed the work was so great that Sonita was given the
opportunity to present her research on pediatric HIV/AIDS at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria in 2008. Presenting in front of the likes of UNICEF, UNAIDS, and other major governmental and non-governmental organizations, "was a powerful experience," she said. "To present to the people who determine industry standard for public health and not only have their ears but have them buzzing with questions was a euphoric moment." Speaking with and learning from such a collection of professionals in her field left Sonita with the impression that, despite her success in her industry, what she had done and was doing was not enough to address the problems of public health. "At the end of the day, you'll get a bit of a Sisyphus complex with public health," she said. "You're putting in a great deal of effort to get that boulder up the hill, but the next day you have to roll the same boulder up the hill. Rather than treating the illness, I was just treating the symptoms." Referencing the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the man tasked with rolling an enormous boulder up the same hill every day for all of eternity as punishment from the gods, she explained her viewpoint at the time that public health could only address so many problems. With that in mind, she returned to school in 2010 as a candidate for a Doctoral Degree in Economics and Public Policy. She felt that her undergraduate degree gave her the credence to be a researcher in the field of disease and prevention, her master's degree gave her the ability to speak with authority in visiting neighboring third world countries, and that her doctoral degree would complete her scope of understanding. Upon completion, she felt she could speak with authority at the chemical, personal, political, and economical level. "It was really the last missing piece to my education," she said. As part of her Doctoral Studies, she was funded by the NIH to lead a research team as the Principal Investigator in Gambia, with the hope of eradicating malaria in the country. Coupling her international experience with her new learned knowledge of economics, she was able to devise a treatment plan that involved diagnosing problem areas by their financial endurance. In her studies, she found that the poorest regions suffered more from the disease
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
21
and were more laggard in their attempts to eradicate it than any other region. The research conducted progressed to a point where she was able to cede control of it to local scientists and public health officials. As her responsibilities eased as Principal Investigator, she was drawn to the Internally Displaced Camps (IDPs) in Uganda that had sprung up as a result of Joseph Kony, the African warlord made famous by the viral social media campaign: KONY2012. While the camps she worked in were far from reported conflict zones, the camp's inhabitants remained as remnants of a war-torn region. Primarily, they were senior citizens, young women, and former child soldiers. In the patriarchal society of Uganda, the former child soldiers' choice to remain in an IDP camp and not seek land inheritance or right was regarded with contempt but, according to Sonita, many simply could not return to a normal life. "What the former child soldiers displayed, by all measures, was intense Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)," she said. "Many were so internally broken by what they had been forced to do as part of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), that they could not force themselves to return to life." To help reduce the number of camp members, Sonita began working with the International Telecommunication Union, a branch of the United Nations, to teach Information Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) to assist
residents by providing relevant training with cheap, renewable forms of technology. "I couldn't help change the structure of society or the way Uganda worked with its patriarchal system," she said, "but what I could do was use what I'd learned in my travels to help these people help themselves become economically independent." Returning from Africa to finish her Doctoral studies at Tulane, Sonita resumed her work in Anti-Recidivism. As a more experienced, professional version of the person she was when she had first begun working with ex-convicts nearly 17 years before, she started her own non-profit organization, the Institute for the Sustainable Transfer of Advanced Renewable Resource Technology (I-STARRT) with the help of the Tulane Center for Public Service, to couple with the work she did with the New Orleans Bureau of Justice Affairs. The classes taught at I-STARRT, which she has encouraged many of her recidivism program adherents to attend, are free and share the combined knowledge of over 20 years of international travel and study. Based on the international teaching program PROMETRA, a program designed to respond to the poor health conditions and inadequate modern health services in third world countries by teaching traditional medicine in any setting to any willing participant, I-STARRT teaches its students everything from African Diaspora to Community and Ecosystem Resilience. "When I first saw PROMETRA in action, it was in a forest
miles and miles away from civilization," she said. "The students present ranged from members of African Bush tribes to university-educated students. They all gathered, set out blankets and tarps in the middle of a clearing, and learned from each other which got me to think why this communal education wasn't applicable worldwide." The program synthesizes a lifelong thirst for learning, experience, charity, and spirituality. Despite her achievements, Sonita is reticent to boast about them. "You can't ever have an ego about public health," she said. "You have the power to change lives and see situations improved for the better, but with that power you also have the responsibility. I believe that with every fiber of my being." The fundamental value for Sonita, as it was when she was a child being raised by her mother, a teenager seeking shelter at La Reine, or a professional discovering her passions in the developing regions of Africa, has always been an intense feeling of love for others. "I believe in the yogi perspective," she said. "I believe that we are all one entity and that when one of us suffers, we are all worse for it. My work comes from an incredibly spiritual place, where there is no distinguishable difference between what I feel spiritually and what I do physically. There are many pathways to God, and I choose to walk the one that goes alongside the less fortunate."
Before Dr. Sonita Singh, second from the right in the top row, ever explored the world, she walked the halls of La Reine High School
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THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
23
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
19
"M
y daughter asks me what religion I practice all the time. Usually I have an answer for her, but generally that answer isn't what she's looking for. 'Love,' I tell her. 'I love.'" Dr. Sonita Singh continues, saying, "I see religions as languages to interact with your spiritual self. I don't label myself or anyone else because I believe compassion and caring are universal." Her daughter, Bhakti Singh, is a living testament to her approach to piety. Named after the Hindu pathway to God through intense love and devotion, Bhakti is a daily reminder of her mission as a mother and professional in the public health industry. A member of one of the last La Reine High School graduating classes, the class of 1991, Sonita immersed herself in the wisdoms of Catholicism. While working for the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research (ICDDR) in Bangladesh and wandering through the countryside of India, she adopted the lessons of Hinduism. During a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research excursion to eliminate malaria in economically challenged regions in Gambia, she discovered the teachings of Islam. Today, Sonita is a student of religion, spirituality, manifestation science, and, for good measure, a Doctoral Candidate at Tulane University where she is writing her dissertation on "Multi-Disaster Resilience at the Economic and Social Household Level in Haiti." With a Bachelor's Degree in Cellular Molecular Biology and a Master's Degree in International Health and Development, Sonita possesses a thirst for knowledge that has been facilitated by the academic realm as well as by her work internationally on the forefront of the battle with HIV/AIDS, obesity, malaria, diarrheal diseases, and severe poverty. Her travels throughout Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, as well as her work in her adopted home, New Orleans, have shaped her worldview and fueled her passion to be a catalyst for change not only in her local community, but as far as she can reach personally, professionally, and spiritually. Her first journey, however, involved no traveling to exotic locations or advising foreign cultures, but rather was rooted in her formative upbringing right outside of
20
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
Washington, D.C. The second of four children born to a single mother, Sonita was often in charge of her own household. Her mother, a public high school teacher in Prince George's County, recognized the shortcomings of the public school system and wanted her children to be well educated at a Catholic school, where they, too, could be shaped by faith. From first grade until high school graduation, Sonita and her three sisters went to Catholic schools. As a single mother, however, this meant sacrifice. Sonita remembers her mother working up to four jobs to make house, car, and school payments. "From a very early age, I got it," she said referring to her family's economic situation. "There would be weeks when my mom would work the day shift, the night shift, and whatever shift was in between all week. When she was home, it was all she could do to not fall asleep standing up. I recognized her struggle and sought to help ease her burden." To help, she got a part-time job. "By the time I got to La Reine High School, I had a part-time job and I was raising my two younger sisters when my mom wasn't around," she said. "It was difficult but it was what I had to do." Sonita found balance in her high school, as she was able to decompress among friends and a supportive faculty and staff. "La Reine challenged me to be better academically, personally, and spiritually while supporting me at a time I really needed it," she said. Balancing the life of a high school student who was also a caretaker and provider gave Sonita a more persistent view of what success should entail for her and her sisters. "I realized how much time and effort my mom put into sending us to school, and because of that I refused to get bad grades," she said. "Even at that age, I had a profound economic sense of the sacrifice being undertaken by our mom and I refused to have it squandered." At La Reine, she found opportunity aplenty in the rigorous academic setting, the welcoming spiritual environment, and the encompassing staff and student body. "Even all these years later," she said, "I still have fond memories of my time at La Reine."
The serenity and academic bliss of her high school stood in heavy contrast to the community in which she lived, however. "I was right in the middle of it when crack cocaine hit Washington, D.C. and all the negativity it brought with it when I was growing up," she said. "On an average night, my sisters and I would hear three to four guns shots. We initially had a difficult time sleeping through them, but after a while you just got used to them — because you knew there was nothing to be done about it and you might as well get some sleep." There was an undercurrent of helplessness in her community, as they felt politicians did little to help with the widespread problems of drug abuse and gang violence. "Most of the people who made laws never had the experience of living through them." Rather, cookie-cutter solutions plagued her area, which resulted in higher rates of incarceration in local prisons, but no end to the drug use and murder that plagued the city corners. Despite only being 18 at the time of her acceptance to Tulane, Sonita knew what she wanted from the next phase of her life, albeit not having any idea how she'd go about it. Having been raised with a great love of science by her mother, she wanted to use her collegiate experience to propel herself into the world of medicine and science to help fix some of the problems that disrupted her home community. As an undergraduate student, she majored in Cellular Molecular Biology, and had an opportunity to travel to Ghana for coursework. The trip challenged Sonita's preconceived notions about herself and her upbringing, as for the first time she was greeted by cultures and communities that not only made do with far less than she ever had, but were happier for it. "If I thought I was ever in harm's way growing up, I was truly misinformed," she said. "In Ghana, those who have little are so grateful for everything they do have in life. It was a transformative experience for me." Returning to finish her Bachelor's degree, Sonita felt reinvigorated about her place in the world. As soon as she graduated, she began working in an Anti-Recidivism program in New Orleans. Recidivism refers to a person's relapse into criminal behavior, often after the person receives sanctions or undergoes intervention for a previous crime.
By working in Anti-Recidivism, Sonita strived to keep rehabilitated offenders from returning to their previous lives of crime. While she studied and applied to Medical School, she worked with parolees. Unlike the politicians in her hometown who took pride in shaping laws and messages without visiting the communities affected by them, Sonita made an effort to prevent recidivism based on individual circumstances. "While I was never able to relate to the nature of their crimes, I began to feel that to truly rehabilitate these men and women, I had to take it upon myself to get to know them and their situations personally," she said. And it worked. With an 85 percent success rate, Sonita and her co-workers received the official stamp of approval from the Attorney General of the United States at the time, Janet Reno. The work was a far reach from her molecular biology background, but the program's success as well as her own personal experience inspired Sonita to continue on the broader path of Public Health. She applied to and was accepted into a Master's program at Tulane that focused on International Health and Development with a focus on Infectious Disease and Tropical Medicines. Her program and work took her to Bangladesh where she worked with the ICDDR, but struggled initially. Sent to teach citizens more sanitary practices for food preparation and waste disposal, Sonita initially struggled to explain the necessity behind her teachings. "I thought to myself, 'this will be easy,'" she said. "They'll completely understand that washing hands is important. Never did I stop to consider the fact that these people and cultures had no context for what I was teaching them. How do you teach someone about killing germs if they cannot understand what a germ is? You can't see it, feel it, touch it, or hear it." Rather than focusing on the microbiology aspect of teaching the local citizens, she opted rather to instruct using easily replicable methods for sanitation she'd learned both in an academic setting and in her travels internationally. A short trip turned into almost a year and a half, as she worked in Bangladesh for nearly six months and then traveled around India in search of spiritual guidance. When she returned home to New Orleans, she had studied the
teachings of Hinduism and deepened her spiritual self by seeking pilgrimage in an ashram, a monastic community for spiritual retreat. The next several years brought Sonita her daughter, Bhakti, as well as an opportunity to focus on wellness in her neighboring communities. She had purpose in her work, as well as the drive to make peoples' lives better with results to back her up. In a weight loss program in Mississippi, she pushed nearly 700 participants to lose a combined 4,000 lbs. in the course of several months. With yearly trips abroad to help with various governmental organizations, she began to enjoy a settled career path until, as had become a pattern in her life, she was dealt a sudden change and forced to adapt. She was confronted by nature's fury in 2003, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. While she and her daughter were able to escape unscathed from the natural disaster, the place she called home was the epicenter of need. Her skills in public health were suddenly in the highest demand. She was immediately hired by the Center for Disease Control to help stem the outbreak of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among the refugees of the storm in the aftermath of the hurricane in Mississippi. The storm and loss of infrastructure prevented necessary treatment and access to vital resources to many of its victims, presenting a situation that required quick, decisive action in order to best serve the public's needs. For over two years, Sonita worked to help those who had been irreparably challenged by the storm regain some semblance of return to their previous, more structured lives. "When it came to working with Katrina refugees, poverty was more debilitating than anything else," she said. "Those that were poor generally lacked education which only worsened their cases and, if they had nothing in New Orleans, they had nothing as refugees." Her work with refugees partnered her with Dr. Hannah Gay — a doctor who is on record as being the first to "functionally cure" a child born with HIV. The acclaim and controversy that followed the work was so great that Sonita was given the
opportunity to present her research on pediatric HIV/AIDS at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria in 2008. Presenting in front of the likes of UNICEF, UNAIDS, and other major governmental and non-governmental organizations, "was a powerful experience," she said. "To present to the people who determine industry standard for public health and not only have their ears but have them buzzing with questions was a euphoric moment." Speaking with and learning from such a collection of professionals in her field left Sonita with the impression that, despite her success in her industry, what she had done and was doing was not enough to address the problems of public health. "At the end of the day, you'll get a bit of a Sisyphus complex with public health," she said. "You're putting in a great deal of effort to get that boulder up the hill, but the next day you have to roll the same boulder up the hill. Rather than treating the illness, I was just treating the symptoms." Referencing the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the man tasked with rolling an enormous boulder up the same hill every day for all of eternity as punishment from the gods, she explained her viewpoint at the time that public health could only address so many problems. With that in mind, she returned to school in 2010 as a candidate for a Doctoral Degree in Economics and Public Policy. She felt that her undergraduate degree gave her the credence to be a researcher in the field of disease and prevention, her master's degree gave her the ability to speak with authority in visiting neighboring third world countries, and that her doctoral degree would complete her scope of understanding. Upon completion, she felt she could speak with authority at the chemical, personal, political, and economical level. "It was really the last missing piece to my education," she said. As part of her Doctoral Studies, she was funded by the NIH to lead a research team as the Principal Investigator in Gambia, with the hope of eradicating malaria in the country. Coupling her international experience with her new learned knowledge of economics, she was able to devise a treatment plan that involved diagnosing problem areas by their financial endurance. In her studies, she found that the poorest regions suffered more from the disease
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
21
and were more laggard in their attempts to eradicate it than any other region. The research conducted progressed to a point where she was able to cede control of it to local scientists and public health officials. As her responsibilities eased as Principal Investigator, she was drawn to the Internally Displaced Camps (IDPs) in Uganda that had sprung up as a result of Joseph Kony, the African warlord made famous by the viral social media campaign: KONY2012. While the camps she worked in were far from reported conflict zones, the camp's inhabitants remained as remnants of a war-torn region. Primarily, they were senior citizens, young women, and former child soldiers. In the patriarchal society of Uganda, the former child soldiers' choice to remain in an IDP camp and not seek land inheritance or right was regarded with contempt but, according to Sonita, many simply could not return to a normal life. "What the former child soldiers displayed, by all measures, was intense Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)," she said. "Many were so internally broken by what they had been forced to do as part of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), that they could not force themselves to return to life." To help reduce the number of camp members, Sonita began working with the International Telecommunication Union, a branch of the United Nations, to teach Information Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) to assist
residents by providing relevant training with cheap, renewable forms of technology. "I couldn't help change the structure of society or the way Uganda worked with its patriarchal system," she said, "but what I could do was use what I'd learned in my travels to help these people help themselves become economically independent." Returning from Africa to finish her Doctoral studies at Tulane, Sonita resumed her work in Anti-Recidivism. As a more experienced, professional version of the person she was when she had first begun working with ex-convicts nearly 17 years before, she started her own non-profit organization, the Institute for the Sustainable Transfer of Advanced Renewable Resource Technology (I-STARRT) with the help of the Tulane Center for Public Service, to couple with the work she did with the New Orleans Bureau of Justice Affairs. The classes taught at I-STARRT, which she has encouraged many of her recidivism program adherents to attend, are free and share the combined knowledge of over 20 years of international travel and study. Based on the international teaching program PROMETRA, a program designed to respond to the poor health conditions and inadequate modern health services in third world countries by teaching traditional medicine in any setting to any willing participant, I-STARRT teaches its students everything from African Diaspora to Community and Ecosystem Resilience. "When I first saw PROMETRA in action, it was in a forest
miles and miles away from civilization," she said. "The students present ranged from members of African Bush tribes to university-educated students. They all gathered, set out blankets and tarps in the middle of a clearing, and learned from each other which got me to think why this communal education wasn't applicable worldwide." The program synthesizes a lifelong thirst for learning, experience, charity, and spirituality. Despite her achievements, Sonita is reticent to boast about them. "You can't ever have an ego about public health," she said. "You have the power to change lives and see situations improved for the better, but with that power you also have the responsibility. I believe that with every fiber of my being." The fundamental value for Sonita, as it was when she was a child being raised by her mother, a teenager seeking shelter at La Reine, or a professional discovering her passions in the developing regions of Africa, has always been an intense feeling of love for others. "I believe in the yogi perspective," she said. "I believe that we are all one entity and that when one of us suffers, we are all worse for it. My work comes from an incredibly spiritual place, where there is no distinguishable difference between what I feel spiritually and what I do physically. There are many pathways to God, and I choose to walk the one that goes alongside the less fortunate."
Before Dr. Sonita Singh, second from the right in the top row, ever explored the world, she walked the halls of La Reine High School
22
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
THE MUSTANG MESSENGER
23
