Sadath Sayeed, MD, JD
Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
Part of Paul’s visionary genius was his pragmatic moral imagination, his ability to continually construct, seemingly out of nothing, collectively welcoming, richly endearing, and enduring responses to a world full of inexplicable injustice. It is pedestrian to repeat but nevertheless worth it: Paul made the impossible seem possible. Where others, including myself, saw (and sometimes still see) Herculean obstacles, he always saw opportunity. Just as Partners In Health came to embody his delivery hand for realizing health care as a human right, the Master’s in Global Health Delivery Program has come to embody his education and training hand.
At the Program’s inception a decade ago, Paul and Joia generously provided me an opportunity to teach a semester-long course, “Conceptual and Practical Ethics for Global Health Delivery.” When I started, I never could have imagined what this gift would come to mean to me today. Mine is a peculiar course. It is not predicated on teaching a measurable competency or technical skill. Rather, it seeks to cultivate the student’s own capacity for critical reflection and ethical introspection about the distance between the rhetoric of equity and the reality of working within what increasingly feels like, inescapably, a self-indulgent industry of global health. Every Winter, I fret - before I meet a new batch of ambitious and accomplished students to embark on a series of weekly conversations which are meant to be more provocative than practical, more frustrating than reassuring – that the pedagogy I’ve crafted won’t captivate.
By the end of every Spring, I am delighted to rediscover the opposite. The truly inspirational yet rarely-celebrated students who come to our program from places near and far—those that have spent years doing the absurdly hard work of trying to deliver decent health care to those who lack it—are grateful for an unrushed opportunity to let their guard down, to speak candidly, to share their own questions, fears, and hopes with equally committed colleagues, and to listen and learn from one another. Every year, I feel blessed to be invited into this truly one-of-a-kind, loving community that insists we must make our world fairer. For me, this remains the unspoken, most crucial aim of the Master’s in Global Health Delivery Program: to nurture and grow our moral community. We meet as fellow travelers, and we depart as dear, lifelong friends. This is a gift greater than any academic poster, presentation, or paper.
Paul built this community for us. It was seeded with his spirit, so it can never cease to blossom. I am humbled by this, and even more so by every student I have had the privilege of listening to and learning from over this past decade. Thank you.
Return to the MMSc-GHD 10th Anniversary page.
Return to the MMSc-GHD main page.
