Courtesy
By Patrick Ball
Staff Writer
Concord - So, you’re a 21-year-old college grad and your first job, which starts in August, is going to send you across the world to design, launch and lead a women’s center in Cambodia, a country still overcoming the effects of social engineering and genocide in the late 1970s by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
A Concord resident who graduated from Boston College last month, Battle will leave home in August to return to Battambang, a small city in northwestern Cambodia, where she spent a semester and the summer last year. She has committed to spending the next two-and-a-half years as director of the Women’s Holistic Health Initiative at the Romero Center, a Jesuit-run community center in Battambang serving the city and surrounding villages.
“Of course there are fears there, but I have had incredible support,” Battle said, adding that the lack of friends and young women with similar backgrounds is “a little disconcerting.”
Cambodia was only supposed to be the “random” stop, a humanitarian jumping-off point for a semester-off spent visiting friends studying abroad in Europe.
Studying for exams her sophomore year, Battle realized she was only working for the grades, which runs counter to the Jesuit college on Chestnut Hill’s philosophy of fashioning men and women for the world. She took a semester off and traveled to Cambodia, planning to stay a few weeks before touring Europe to see her friends studying overseas.
After bonding with a young villager whose mother asked Battle, then 19, to adopt her, she cancelled her ticket to Europe and stayed on with the Jesuits working at the Romero Center, where she introduced a health component to the English class she was teaching.
“I had thought, ‘I need to take some time to figure out why I’m here,’” Battle said of her decision to take a semester off. “Coming back, I could put faces to the issues they were talking about.”
She returned the next summer and, before she left, the Jesuits invited her to return after graduating to help start, and then run, their new Women’s Holistic Health Initiative.
When she returns to Cambodia in August, Battle will spend a few months in Phnom Penh, the capital city, studying Khmer at the University, networking with organizations working on women’s issues and developing a plan for the Women’s Holistic Health Initiative.
From Phnom Penh, she will head to the Romero Center in Battambang to establish the program, which will promote education about women’s health in the villages surrounding the city, and train the Khmer staff to whom she will ideally hand it over.
Battle said public health issues like domestic violence and distrust in hospitals and existing healthcare are among the lingering effects from Khmer Rouge, which ruled from 1975 to 1979 and broke down the Khmer culture with agrarian communism and genocide.
The plan, she said, is to work from a public health perspective to “create new norms about what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable,” beginning with groups of young women and unmarried men.
“A lot of these are values they hold but don’t have the space to discuss yet,” Battle said, adding that she’ll be “using a preventative model rather than a reactive model.”
Her work will be supported by funding from the Jesuits, which will cover her daily living costs and expenses, but Battle has been working to procure additional funding for her “dream budget” of $40,000. A few events at BC have helped her raise more than $15,000 thus far, and she plans to continue fundraising this summer and to seek grants once the Women’s Holistic Health Initiative is an established program.
Although she’ll be apart from friends and family, Battle says she’s loves what she’s doing in Battambang and that she hopes to continue doing this kind work.
“I’m happier there than I’ve ever been,” she said. “I’m learning all the time. Every day I’m there I think of a new degree to get.”
During her time at Boston College, Battle said she was blessed to spend (grant funded) time in Honduras and through Central and South America. Her experiences have lead to some wide-ranging interests rooted in public health issues and “bound together by the Jesuits’ constant challenge to transform my faith and deepen my active commitment to justice,” as she writes in her fundraising letter.
“I can see a path,” Battle said. “My faith has always been important to me, and working with the church has always been on the table.”
To support the Women’s Holistic Health Initiative, make out checks to the Apostolic Prefecture of Battambang and mail to Meghan Battle, 52 Bedford St., Concord, MA 01742. For more information call Battle at 978-394-3256.
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