‘Where the Work Is’.
Sera Bonds ('04) Alum; Founder and Executive Director of Circle of Health International (COHI)
Age: 42
Hometown: Fayetteville, Arkansas (“I’ve lived a lot of places, but that’s where I spent the largest part of my childhood.”)
Breakfast: “I had a banana and some tea that my sister put in a thermos for me before I left her apartment this morning—Kashmiri chai with soymilk.”
You founded and lead Circle of Health International (COHI), which provides reproductive, maternal, and newborn healthcare in crisis settings around the world. Why this issue, this kind of organization?
I’m a midwife by training. When we started the organization 12 years ago, midwives were not a part of the response coordination effort in humanitarian emergencies, which is interesting because women and children are 80 percent of the world’s displaced people. Midwives didn’t have a place at the table, so I wanted to create an organization that works primarily with and in support of midwives.
Midwives are a part of the conversation now. We recently won an award at the UN in innovation—there were eight finalists and four of them were working with midwives.
What was COHI like in the beginning?
COHI started in an Airstream trailer in Austin, Texas, by the Colorado River in a pecan grove. I sat at my little kitchen counter (also my bed) in my Airstream, and I wrote hundreds of emails every day. I was so poor I didn’t even eat rice and beans: I ate rice or beans. I just worked 18 hours a day. I worked all the time.
Do you work differently now?
When I was 30, when I started the organization, I was single, I didn’t have children, all I did was work, and I loved working and I just worked all the time. Anything that I read for pleasure was about work. I don’t do any of that anymore. Anything I do outside of work I try to make sure has nothing to do with my job.
I am deeply committed to my workout regimen—I’m an open water swimmer and I swim vast swaths of water where no one can bother me.
I’ve trained my children to say to me when they see me on my phone, ‘Mom, work when it’s time to work, play when it’s time to play.’ That said, mothering is a very political thing for me: I take very seriously the raising of two small white men, and bringing them up in a world where they understand the privilege and the responsibility they were born with.
How has COHI changed as it shifts more toward the Middle East in response to the Syrian civil war?
Syria is a context that had a really thriving middle class. If you were sick in the Middle East eight years ago, Damascus was a place you went for healthcare. Unlike other contexts where we work, a significant group of the population did everything ‘right’: they delayed marriage, they delayed having kids, they worked middle-class jobs so that their children would have better lives than they did, and they just got this dictator who has thrown them under the bus.
Not only do you have a lot of Second- to First World chronic disease that needs to be managed in this population, but you have a certain level of expectation about how healthcare is provided. They’re engineers and school teachers and doctors, so there’s another level of trauma that we’re dealing with in this population. That has to be taken into consideration when working with them.
What has been your best experience with COHI? What are you most proud of?
The work we did with Israeli and Palestinian midwives, bringing them together. The program was called Midwives for Peace. We started it 11 years ago and now it’s its own standing organization, totally self-directed, and it’s expanded from a membership of 10 to 50. They meet all the time, they go to each other’s kids’ birthdays and bar mitzvahs and weddings, and they do that in spite of the wars and conflicts that have happened in the time they’ve known each other. There’s an incredible amount of courage and humility in that group.
What has been hardest?
Probably some of the hardest stuff we’ve done outside of Syria—which is its own long, long, long trudge through the mud—is this work on the Texas-Mexico border where we have a clinic in McAllen, Texas, this border town. We see folks right after they’re released from Border Patrol, and they’re severely traumatized. They’ve been traveling for weeks or months. Many of the women are either very late-term pregnant and trying to get to the US to have their babies or they had their babies along the way.
This project is like Groundhog Day. Every time I go down to McAllen nothing has improved. When I say “clinic” I mean it’s a glamorized closet in the back of a church, and we’re trying really hard to show up for a community that no one wants to own, and that’s really politicized.
We identified that human trafficking was a real issue, and that no one who was responding to them in the Rio Grande Valley had any training—there was one police officer on the entire border responsible for responding to calls about human trafficking. So we have become the people who go to the Valley to do training on trafficking.
It’s so heartbreaking because you see what needs to be done and you don’t have the power to do it. But it doesn’t mean you don’t keep trying.
What is it like to run an international reproductive health organization based in Texas, where abortion rights are being fought out very visibly?
I have also always believed that I can go on vacation in Oakland or I can go hang out in Brooklyn where everybody’s cool with everything, but that’s not where the work is.
I did a fellowship eight years ago with NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, and what they wanted me to do was develop a campaign for the abortion clinics in Texas that needed to rebrand themselves. I did not think that the work I had done in the Middle East would be the same skill set. We are sought out by people in Texas doing reproductive rights because of the work we do in other places.