Upper Schoolers Explore Virtues of Changes Small and Large

When Katherine Marshall was 16, her family lived in Nigeria during an outbreak of cholera. At their local hospital, the influx of patients overwhelmed the medical staff, requiring the help of volunteers including Marshall, who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

 

The hospital was filled past capacity, with hundreds of people awaiting medical attention. "I still remember the sea [of people] lying on plywood boards outside the mission hospital," Marshall recalled to NCS Upper School students Jan. 22 during the 22nd annual Janet Griffith Lecture on International Affairs.

 

As Marshall and her father assisted, the physician on staff urged them to look around at the sick people waiting. Marshall saw that they were almost all men. The women and children, the doctor explained, were at home dying because they could not get access to treatment.

 

"I faced a choice. I wanted to be a doctor, which meant helping someone individually," Marshall told the NCS students assembled in Grace Chapel, "but what he impressed on me is that you can also look at it from the system level. How do you change the system so you're providing basic health care?"

 

This question led her to change her career ambition. Instead of medicine, she pursued a career in global development.

 

"That's what development is about—how to deal with this enormous question of unfairness and injustice," said Marshall, who is executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue and worked for several decades at the World Bank.

 

Marshall advised students to follow their values and ethics as they decide how to make change in the world and what career path to follow. Systemic change, while important, is not the only avenue. Marshall cited her daughter's decision to make change on an individual level; she joined the Peace Corps and became a doctor.

 

"We went different paths, and you can do different paths at different stages in your life," she said.

 

Marshall reflected on how much progress has been made in global development over the past 50 years and advised, "We have to believe that the type of world we'd like to see is really truly possible, and that is the source of the most important hope. But it's also clear that it's not going to happen automatically. It needs to happen with will and determination and willingness to deal with the evil that we know there is in the world."

 

The Janet Griffith Lecture, established in 1998, honors the former NCS faculty member and administrator who founded the school's international program. Past speakers have included Madeleine Albright, Ngozi Iweala, Julia Alvarez, Bishop John Bryson Chane, and Betty Bao Lord. Griffith herself attended this year's lecture.