In the News!
Southwestern Michigan College’s 42nd commencement
By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Monday, May 4, 2009 10:58 AM EDT
(Hilda Alcindor, Dean of the FSIL Nursing School, was commencement speaker at Southwestern Michigan College on May 2, 2009.)
School of Nursing in Haiti Succeeds Against All Odds
By Nancy Crawley | The Grand Rapids Press
Sunday April 20, 2008, 6:44 AM
(An interview with Dean Hilda Alcindor)
By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Monday, May 4, 2009 10:58 AM EDT
Dean Hilda Alcindor, RN, cried at her own 1971 nursing school graduation in Haiti.
Not tears of joy, but sorrow, Southwestern Michigan College’s 42nd commencement keynote speaker said Saturday morning.
“I was very sad,” she confided.
“Graduation is a day of mixed feelings - joy, anxiety - and also a day of reflection. You are being separated from your favorite teachers and from friends you made along the way. I cried because you don’t have the right to be a nurse. It is a privilege” about which self-doubt gnawed at her.
“Take care of yourself first. If you are sick, you cannot take care of other people,” she said.
“No matter where you are in the world, education serves as the foundation to greater and better things” she said. “I’m sure there were long nights, worrying about deadlines, missing family meals and anxious moments,” making graduation day all the sweeter.
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“You succeeded,” Alcindor said.
“You learned the most important lesson: Get up, get started and keep going. I challenge you to experience, not only in your professional lives, but also in your emotional and spiritual lives as well. Serve others, serve colleagues, serve the world. Service is rewarding. I’m talking from experience.”
In the United States, “When I turn on the faucet, I get water. When I flip the switch, I get light. I don’t have that” in Haiti, where “I have to travel from where I live to get a shower. Serving is the core of who we are as human beings, no matter where we come from in the world,” Alcindor said.
“Live well and keep going,” she urged. “Stay focused on your goals, both personal and professional. Listen to others. Be open, honest. Whenever possible, reduce uncertainty by giving people clear answers. Provide sufficient information to reduce the negative aspects of uncertainty. Be a leader, be a teacher, be a mentor. Most of all, keep going. You must always keep going so that the future remains bright. Maybe someday I’ll see you in Haiti, coming to work for us, with us.”
Board of Trustees Chairman Dr. Fred L. Mathews centered his remarks on the Thorpe family of Niles, whom he met after the reception for honor students. Sean and Stephanie received associate degrees in the Division of Academic Studies. Two siblings graduated previously.
“The Thorpes have two other sons in high school who will be attending SMC,” Mathews said. “Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe told me in the most generous way why they had chosen SMC as their college home - the faculty. The family told me about great classroom instruction and the special help the faculty gives students generously of their time. I have never heard a better testimony to our great faculty.”
So Mathews also shined a “special spotlight” on the SMC faculty.
“No matter how well the rest of us do our jobs, it would be for naught without a great faculty,” he said.
“Student success is what SMC is all about,” Mathews added, introducing elected trustees, who serve without pay: Vice Chairman Keith McKenzie of Marcellus, Secretary Jan Kairis of Edwardsburg, Treasurer Carole Tate of Decatur and Trustees Tom Jerdon of Dowagiac and Bill White of Jones, and Cass County Commissioners Gordon Bickel Sr., R-Constantine, and Vice Chairman Ron Francis, R-Cassopolis, whose grandson Austin graduated.
“For the past several years, the college has done everything possible to help assure your success,” Mathews said. “Now, we will turn the tables on you as you go from being students to alumni. As an SMC graduate, your future is bright. The difference between students and alumni is support. As successful alumni, you will be called on in the months and years ahead to help out the college. We hope you all join the alumni association and become supporters of this college.”
Published in The Grand Rapids Press, this article may be viewed online at MLive.com, Everything Michigan:
School of Nursing in Haiti succeeds against all odds
By Nancy Crawley | The Grand Rapids Press
Sunday April 20, 2008, 6:44 AM
Hilda Alcindor joined me for dinner on a rainy night in Grand Rapids before she flew back to Haiti, where she leads a school of nursing.
Shortly after, food riots broke out in Port-au-Prince, 20 miles from her small, white-washed campus.
At least seven people and a U.N. peacekeeper were killed.
Alcindor e-mailed her Michigan supporters that she was OK and life had returned to normal at the School of Nursing in Leogane. But it was a grim reminder of the incredible odds she and her support network face in trying to graduate their first class of nurses in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
The story of Hilda Alcindor and this little school is not a typical Press business column, certainly, but it is a glimpse into another world with just the thinnest veneer of life as we know it.
When we worry about grocery prices and health care premiums, those issues take on another meaning in a nation of nearly 9 million where malnutrition and disease are rampant and the government is nearly nonexistent.
The 50-some-year-old Alcindor is a native of Haiti who left her homeland for the United States, where she lived for three decades.
Taking the job of dean in 2004 meant giving up her comfortable life in Miami, where she worked at Mount Sinai Medical Center, drove a Lincoln and raised her two daughters.
Now, she lives in a house with no running water or electricity, in a rural area with a growing food shortage. At times, she has hired a policeman to stay at the house.
The evening we met, she was accompanied by retired University of Michigan nursing educators/clinicians, Ruth Barnard and Marge Van Meter.
Both helped launch the school and now are leaders of the Haiti Nursing Foundation, the fundraising arm.
They had driven over to visit International Aid in Spring Lake to pick up donated medical equipment, gloves, gauze, IV poles and “lab-in-a-suitcase” kits for medical testing in remote locations.
Though they were probably among the least expensive items, Alcindor was particularly pleased with the boxes of toothbrushes she picked up.
“Each student gets a toothbrush, a washcloth and deodorant,” Alcindor said. “They have to learn first about taking care of their own hygiene.”
It is part of the cultural and educational transformation for these impoverished young people, most fresh from high school.
The education is designed to parallel a U.S. education, and the first class — about 13 students — graduates in January with baccalaureate RN degrees.
The school’s mission is faith-based, operating under the Episcopal University of Haiti. The Presbyterian Medical Benevolence Foundation was a major force in its creation.
Funding for the six classrooms and dormitory came from a USAID grant, but the government agency does not fund programming, staff or equipment.
So Alcindor has had to do a lot of improvising to keep the school on its feet.
The first class size was set at 36 students for a very practical reason — she had 18 desks that could accommodate two students each.
But dorm space was the real constraint, forcing her to squeeze four, rather than two, students into a room. She also rented an apartment building and strung a wire across the street so it has power from the school generator.
Alcindor is most passionate, though, when she talks about her determination to build the self esteem and confidence of her students.
She particularly wants her female students to learn to “impose” themselves, her term for standing up for themselves in a male-dominated society.
“I tell the young women to stand straight, hold up their heads and walk tall,” she said.
Tall and imposing herself, Alcindor commands attention as she describes her school’s mission “to fulfill the dream” of producing dedicated, well trained nurses to help their homeland.
This is a mission that came to her at just the right time, she said, when at middle age she was asking God what she should do with her life.
Shortly after she was recruited for the dean’s job and took that as a sign. Now, she travels back to the U.S. several times a year to help raise funds.
Many people in the United States and Haiti pitched in to open the school in 2005. But Van Meter, foundation secretary, said Alcindor is the linchpin to the school’s success.
“She is our best weapon.”
