Category Global health and disparities

FMM 5 2 2025 ‘A it mek!’

“Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?” ~ Desmond Tutu. One of the great defining features of my life was the fact that my family moved from a city in the UK to the heart of rural Jamaica when I was […]

FMM 4 11 2025 It’s a MAD…world!

“Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.” ~ Walt Whitman. Confession time.  There have been a couple of times in my life when my fantasies have helped me to make a decision.  I realized that I needed to end my marriage when I had started to think my life would be better if […]

FMM 4 4 2025 Tan Tuddy!

“May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.” ~ Peter Marshall. I was a frontline nurse working in Miami when AIDS appeared, with all of the unknowns that went along with it.  In the early years it seemed to be […]

FMM 3 28 2025 I Plead the First

“Why should I be afraid of the pestilence that crawleth by night?” Tony Rebel. Because I am the youngest in my family and the last to leave home, I spent my last four years in high school as an only child.  That wasn’t exactly true, since we always had ‘boarders’, friends from high school who […]

FMM 3 21 2025 Imaginary Engineers

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” ~ Alice Walker. I was a bedside nurse in the 1980s, a time when the way the government reimbursed hospitals for patient stays was upended completely.  Prior to this time, any patient whose insurance was paid for by the […]

FMM 3 14 2025 Holding Space

“… everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.” ~ Louise Erdrich. Some years ago I had an experience which proved invaluable in the classroom: I witnessed a man experiencing the sudden onset of a stroke.  We were at a fundraising dance together, he had gone to buy us a drink each, and […]

FMM 3 7 2025 The Boss of Me

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” ~ Maximilien Robespierre. Evelyn was the first person who befriended me when I was the new girl in school.  I was more than new, I was different, a little girl in rural Jamaica, with an English accent […]

FMM 2 21 2025 No Dominion!

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is keeping them ignorant.” ~ Maximilien Robespierre. I have always been a lover of words.  Except once when I heard a new word, spoken in a sentence, by a person I had very little respect for.  She happened to be my boss.  […]

FMM 2 14 2025 Hope Springs Maternal

“Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,” ~ Emily Dickinson. I always knew I would have children.  Lots of them.  I remember being quite young when I held a baby, she was about seven months old, and she promptly tried to bite […]

FMM 2 7 2025 No Fury

“The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.” ~ William Jennings Bryan. When I was no more than twelve or thirteen, I came home one day from school for lunch, which was my usual habit.  I was not expecting […]