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Atti-La Dahlgren recalls the moment that his public health life took a sharp turn toward the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. It was May 2002, at the World Health Organization’s annual World Health Assembly. Dahlgren, MPH ’00, a global health physician in Geneva, was waiting for a bus home when a friend passed by and invited him, on the spur of the moment, to a closed-door meeting of health ministers. “I listened as several ministers stood up to talk. It soon became obvious that while the name of the minister or the country changed, each 15-minute speech was more or less the same—until the health minister from Bhutan took the floor,” Dahlgren recalls. “He spoke without notes. He explained that his was one of the poorest countries in the world. And he said he was going on a 560-kilometer walk across the country, village to village, to talk about the importance of public health. He spoke freely, from his heart. I was completely captured.” Call it karma. “When I became involved with Bhutan,” says Dahlgren, now president of the Inter-
national Bhutan Foundation, “I learned that nothing happens by coincidence.” STEEP ODDS, IMPRESSIVE GAINS
Bhutan’s may be one of the greatest public health success stories never told. And four Harvard School of Public Health alumni—Dahlgren, Gepke Hingst, MPH ’95, Kathy Morley, MPH ’10, and Michael Morley, MHCM ’11—have lately been at the center of the action. In different ways, each is playing a role in improving a public health system that has already made impressive strides against almost impossibly steep odds: financial, cultural, and topographic. Their shared mission has taken them off the beaten path. Asked to point to Bhutan on a world map, most people would be stumped. Half the size of Indiana, wedged between India and China, this compact nation of 700,000 has spent most of its history in self-imposed isolation. Never conquered or occupied, it tentatively began modernization in the 1960s. Internet and television didn’t arrive until 1999. continued
15 Winter 2013