hen Mona Kumar was a freshman in Alice Lloyd residence hall, she remembers walking down Observatory Hill toward Main Street
and being struck by the reality of a larger community outside the campus.
The everyday problems that plague everyday folks seemed to her a sharp contrast to the frivolous, happy-go-lucky student life she encountered around campus. Her roommate, an Ann Arbor native, decided to get involved working at a soup kitchen that provided meals to the homeless and asked if Kumar would be interested in getting involved, too. She was.
The woman who ran the soup kitchen had served her food to the homeless every Tuesday for 11 years. Kumar, motivated and inspired by this woman's dedication,
decided she wanted to do more. "She propelled me forward," Kumar recalls.
Across the way from the soup kitchen, Kumar spotted Ozone House, a crisis center for runaway and homeless teens. Ozone House requires 40 hours of largely
introspective training of its volunteers that helps them gain a greater perspective on the issues that face their clients. Kumar says that through reflection she realized that
she wanted to commit herself "to ending oppression and to a personal goal of self empowerment."
This commitment took her next to SAFEHouse/The Domestic Violence Project. Again she underwent an intensive training session to sensitize her to the issues
surrounding domestic violence. She chose to work in a program in which her role was to respond to domestic assault arrest situations in nine of 12 jurisdictions in Washtenaw County. This entailed receiving a call in which she was provided with a brief summary of the incident and the address of the victim. She and a partner would then drive to the house to provide support and counseling to the battered woman.
"My first night on-call was a dramatic experience," she recalls. "I was so nervous. But when I began talking with this woman, who had a totally different background
than mine, and she was in this terrible, violent relationship, I realized how alike we were. We're the same age. She wanted to be a doctor like I do. And six months later,
I found myself breaking up with a man who was emotionally abusive. It can happen to anybody. What separated me from her was nothing more than circumstance and lucky breaks."
Mona Kumar grew up in an affluent Indian family. She is a first-generation American. Her father is a radiation physicist and her mother a neonatal pediatrician. She attributes her sensitivity to "diversity issues" to growing up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, feeling like an outsider because she is a woman of color. But perhaps she was just born sensitive. "My father always called me his PC child," she says.
Kumar's acute awareness of the two types of education she was receiving, one at the University and one in the community, gave her the desire to combine the two. She found the means to do this through the Office of Community Service Learning (OCSL).
As part of OCSL's Project Community, Kumar helped to teach a class on domestic violence. Next she helped found the Michigan Women's Issues Network to focus women's power on educational, health, workplace and political issues.
She also became a site leader of the OCSL Alternative Spring Break program, in which students spend their week-long spring break pitching in on a variety of programs
in stressed communities around the country. Kumar chose to work with Haitian refugees in Miami, where she worked on funding and housing needs, taught English and helped paint the entrance to a local church.
OCSL Director Jeffrey Howard sees Kumar as a "shining example of commitment to people in the community, to her peers and to her own education." It is the reason that she was nominated for the national Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian Award, an honor that is presented to five undergraduates annually for outstanding public service. About 500 students are nominated each year. Kumar was one of the 1996 winners, and she donated the $1,500 that comes with the award to Michigan's Alternative Spring Break program to help create the Alternative Summer Break program.
Kumar began to wonder if her commitment to medicine would enable her to continue her involvement in righting social wrongs. She feared that with the end of her years at college, her ability to be an advocate for change would also end. However, she found a common thread in her many experiences: health. So she decided to explore the creation of a women's health major which would combine her medical interests and her interest in women's issues.
With the help of Liina Wallin in the Honor's College Independent Concentration Program, Kumar outlined a curriculum and became in May the first Michigan undergraduate to earn a degree in Women's Health.
Of course she didn't stop there. She went on to create a course guide, with the help of the Michigan Initiative for Women's Health (MIWH), titled Women's Health: A Guide
to Curricular Opportunities at the University of Michigan, to ease the path of others interested in following in her footsteps.
Kumar's involvement with MIWH brought her to Dr. Timothy Johnson, professor and chair of obstretics and gynecology. Impressed with her achievements, Johnson suggested she speak to Dr. Elizabeth Shadigian, who shares many of the same
interests. Kumar approached Shadigian with the idea to conduct research exploring the prevalence of domestic violence during pregnancy and its medical consequences. The
research became her thesis project with Johnson as her advisor. In 60 pages, it outlined the underlying causes of battering, the medical approaches to domestic violence and Kumar's recommendations for appropriate interventions in the future (the clinical research is still in the works).
"What is unique about Mona," Johnson says, "is the focus of her interests and energies, which will empower her not only in a professional sense, but also enable her
to become an agent of change. Which you can tell she's going to do."
In the fall, Kumar will attend the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She plans to become an Ob/Gyn specialist and work in urban clinics providing
prenatal care to low-income mothers.
For the moment, however, Kumar plans to take it easy. "I need to breathe," she says. There is no doubt, however, that once she has caught her breath, Kumar will be
off and running again, motivated by her vision of the world's possibilities to improve education, women's rights, health care and humane feeling.
Lisa Herbert is an Ann Arbor free-lance writer and an assistant
in U-M's Office of Affirmative Action.
. . . June 1996
