round from their Kalashnikov into the air, and that served as the bell, so to speak.” Even as Dolan and her team tried to introduce Western values of gender equality, they respected local customs and sensibilities. Dolan never donned a full burka, but her clothing covered most of her body, from neck to ankles. And while she never felt threatened as a woman, “If I showed up without my male colleagues in a community or village, I wouldn’t be taken very seriously.” In one village, the elders told Dolan that there were no women who knew how to read or write — that is, until someone pulled her aside and showed her where those women lived. Nevertheless, Dolan was unsuccessful in negotiating their inclusion in the teacher training program; the male elders wouldn’t let them participate. “Other than navigating our way through land mines on the roads, the hardest part about working in education in Afghanistan was navigating the cultural and gender norms,” she said. A month after that initial teacher training, Dolan and her team returned to the village to see whether classes were still meeting; they were. In fact, one teacher told her that the most challenging part of teaching girls was getting them to leave once classes were over. “I hope they are OK now,” Dolan said, reflecting on recent events in Afghanistan, “and I hope for the women these girls have become.”
From Afghanistan to Vermont
During her stint in Afghanistan, Dolan met her future husband, Chanon Bernstein, who worked on the team setting up schools. The couple married in 2004 and had their first daughter the following year. They adopted their second daughter in 2009. Because Dolan and Bernstein didn’t want to travel internationally while raising their girls, the family resettled in Vermont, where Bernstein grew up. In March 2009, Dolan arrived in Vermont from Ethiopia on a Friday and started her job at the Vermont Department of Health on the following Monday. She began as the department’s director of planning, overseeing the Office of Minority Health and the Office of Rural Health and Primary Care. In January 2011, then-governor Peter Shumlin appointed her deputy health commissioner. Sharon Moffatt, Vermont’s health commissioner from 2006 to 2008, never 34
COURTESY OF TRACY DOLAN
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Afghan boys and a teacher at a school Tracy Dolan and her team helped establish in Takhar Province
She didn’t hold herself apart from everyone else … She would empathize in a very human way. JANE L IND H O L M
worked with Dolan in state government. But the two met when Moffatt was with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, where Dolan chaired a national committee of high-ranking health officials. “I always found Tracy to be a great listener,” Moffatt said. “Tracy didn’t need to be the front person all the time.” Later, when Moffatt worked for the CDC Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she and Dolan cooperated to fill vacant health department positions such as contact tracers, case investigators and laboratory technicians. (Early in the pandemic, Dolan did some contract tracing herself because the state was short-staffed.) “I worked with Tracy almost up to the day she left” in assessing the health department’s needs, Moffatt said, noting Dolan’s unwavering dedication. Moffatt said she was sad to hear that Dolan had left the health department. But speaking as a former public health nurse who spent two decades working with New
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Americans, she said Dolan was an excellent choice to head the refugee office. “She brings a depth of understanding of the journey these individuals have taken,” Moffatt said. “Tracy is a very compassionate person … She does this work because she cares about people and the community we’re in.”
A Standup Leader
Dolan stumbled into standup comedy in her forties, when she befriended Marianne DiMascio, a regional director at the Community College of Vermont who also writes and performs sketch comedy routines for her theater company, Stealing From Work. “One day I said to Tracy, ‘You’re funny. Have you ever thought of doing comedy?’” DiMascio recalled. “And she said, ‘Actually, I’d love to do standup.’” So when Dolan first tried her hand at an open mic night at Nectar’s, DiMascio was in the audience. “She did it, and she was great — a real natural,” DiMascio said.
Dolan remembers it differently. “I’d been doing public speaking for a long time, and I got up and thought, I’m gonna be fine,” Dolan said. “My legs shook the whole time.” She stuck with it and soon discovered that she had a knack for standup. When Natalie Miller and Nathan Hartswick opened the Vermont Comedy Club in November 2015, Dolan became a regular. She has occasionally taken her routine on the road, performing at the She-Devil Comedy Festival in New York City and in Boston’s Women in Comedy Festival. “You never need to worry about Tracy,” Hartswick said. “She’s always got her act together, [and] she always does well in front of a crowd.” Miller agreed, calling Dolan “a pillar” of Vermont’s comedy scene. “Tracy’s got it all. How does she do it? She’s got kids. She’s got a job. And she’s one of the best people in the standup scene,” Miller said. “And she has experiences
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