A brief introduction to Gnawa

I'm an anthropologist by training concerned with issues of race and global health. These seemingly disparate issues are more closely related than one might think although I came to them serendipitously. Being the child of hippie parents who grew up in all white segregated communities, my parents left college and vowed to have their children live diversity on a daily basis. So they moved us into an all Black neighborhood on Chicago's south side and my sister and I grew up being one of the few white students in all of the schools we went to. Consequently, I have always been drawn to discussions of race, diversity and, most significantly, privilege.

After undergrad, I joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to a small desert community in Tata Province, Morocco as a health volunteer. Ultimately Peace Corps was more about one on one cultural exchange than anything to do with health care and it wasn't until I entered graduate school and began looking for specific applications of my training that I started thinking about disparities in health care access and the the cultural factors that need to be accounted for when thinking about how we implement potential solutions.