Megan Frenzen, a health economist, and her physician husband, Seth, are no strangers to service work following natural and man-made disasters. They have traveled to various countries, including postearthquake Haiti, to offer medical care and other assistance when crises occur.

So when the refugee crisis loomed large in Greece, Megan began researching medics working on the Greek island of Lesbos (also called Lesvos), where many refugees arrive from Turkey, to see how they could help. She located one American who had known her husband during his residency. Then she texted or called anyone she could think of who had served with her previously or who had expressed an interest in service work.

One of the first to step up was Mari Cordes, a UVM Medical Center nurse who had worked with Megan in Haiti. Another was Ruba Orfali, a Syrian American student at St. Michael’s College in Burlington, who had never volunteered for service work but who wanted to help as an interpreter. It wasn’t long before nurse-practitioner Barbara Swan was on board, too.

“It was my first medical mission,” Barbara says. “It felt surreal when I made the decision, but I love health care, and I wanted to feel like I was doing something to help.”

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Sue Gillis
Vermont Woman Publisher

Ah! Springtime in Vermont! A friend recently asked me this question: What was the most beautiful thing you experienced in the last two weeks? I was stumped for a while. But then I thought of one night when I just happened to notice that the sky looked like it was simply exploding with stars, and it was so overwhelming that they seemed to speak right out loud, just to me. “Look up, look up, you ole fool. It’s us, millions and millions of us diamonds in the sky.” I knew I had found my answer.

Some of you may know that my home is on its own point at the edge of an open meadow, far away from the noise of a busy world. The house, which was originally a “cottage getaway” for vacationing New Yorkers, was built in 1905; it is 111 years old this year. And the best part is most of it is unchanged. It is, of course, winterized, but it retains all the original flooring, ceilings, and beams, a rubble fireplace, and a wraparound screen porch.

There are spirits within these walls, too. I suspect they belong to those who lived here before me, and there were several. You will have to trust me on this: I know they are here because I can sense them from time to time, and they were particularly vocal when the house was undergoing physical change. I know that sounds batty; and as a big skeptic myself, I agree. Still there are times...

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A TV ad for an online print company shows a doctor marketing his boutique medical practice using the company’s services. Ubiquitous drug advertising by the pharmaceutical industry targets patients whom, it hopes, will partner with the industry in creating demand for its pills. The New York Times runs a piece on “how advertising promotes expensive drugs and treatment you may not need” (“Ask Your Doctor if This Ad Is Right for You,” February 27, 2016) and asks whether “hospitals and drug companies are targeting the well-insured,” while pointing out that medical-related ads have become a billion-dollar industry. As mega-medical centers proliferate, consumers may reasonably ask if health care is becoming a product instead of a service.

Against this backdrop, and amid growing concern about the direction and cost of health care in this country, the University of Vermont Health Network, a four-hospital partnership led by the University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMC), recently announced “a public awareness campaign” aimed at introducing its combined services and offered a “brand promise” to bring “the best of community and academic medicine together for patients” throughout Vermont and northern New York.

Along with this four-hospital partnership—which includes Central Vermont Medical Center, in Berlin, and two hospitals in New York—UVMC has also developed a growth plan for its Burlington facilities. It’s an ambitious long-term plan that could cause some consumers and their advocates to wonder if medical centers generally, and UVMC specifically, are becoming “too big to fail”—or be held accountable for their expansion or expenditures.

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They sit in a semicircle, fully attentive. Some wear hijab, looking like Botticelli-painted nuns. Others reveal their hair, perhaps a headscarf wrapped loosely around their necks. Some are married and mothers; some are single. One is a foreign student earning her PhD studying art as social commentary among Middle Eastern women. A few are struggling to find their way to feminism in a Middle East context, while others celebrate their arrival into the world of like-minded women. They are studying for master’s degrees at the University of Jordan in Amman, where I was invited to speak last November about the history of the women’s movement in America and beyond.

The young women gazing at me remind me of something I have known since I became engaged in, and committed to, feminism: the world is full of feminists, fledging or fully developed. They reside in every continent and community and likely have been there for a long time, although we may not have called them that in their day. They remind me, too, of women I met in Nairobi at the final UN Decade for Women conference in 1985, some who came knowing they would be severely punished when they returned home, and yet they came, 14,000 strong.

They also remind me of women I met in Beijing 10 years later at the Fourth World Conference on Women, some of whom came with male chaperones, and yet they came, 40,000 strong. They remind me of women who came to give testimony, to offer analysis through the lens of gender, to speak truth to power, to inspire and advise others.

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