Spending a month volunteering at Mother Theresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta, India was a life changing experience for Wendy Voet, a public health advocate and adjunct associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The injustice of “watching people die of diseases that could be easily treated in the United States,” had a profound impact on her. “Everyone deserves the same means to have the human experience they want to have,” she says.
Her parents were academics. The academic life was inspiring. It taught Wendy to ask the questions and stay open to learning. In the summer her parents would travel, and the experiences opened the world to her, inspiring her to study abroad in college and then join the Peace Corps where she served in Niger. It was there that she recognized the shared humanity that exists between all people. While the lives of the people she met may have been different than her own, she learned that we all want the same basic things and it inspired her to go about working to make sure that the inequities that exist might someday be rectified.
As you listen to this episode consider:
How can you approach the things that are unfamiliar to you with curiosity rather than judgement?
Can you listen to different perspectives and see what you might learn?
When faced with people who are different from you, can you focus on the experiences and desires that unite us?
You can listen to Wendy’s episode here.