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AI: But at, so anyway, at this point, then you both returned to Seattle. And then how did you get involved with the, your next position, which was the Fund for Technology Transfer?

PJ: Right. Well, the only international -- so I came back, just completely energized, like, "This is what I want to do with my life, I want to work in international -- " at that time, I, I said international development. Now, I think I don't want to work in development at all, I want to work in social justice. So my, my sophistication, I think, about what I really want has changed as I've gone through these experiences. But international development at that time, the only organization that was doing it here was PATH, which is the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, and it was working in primarily the health field, manufacturing, designing, manufacturing, distributing, working with very basic technologies that could change health. And it started really working on reproductive issues and then has, has grown, and now it's really the arm, the operating arm for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's work internationally with HIV and AIDS and polio and all of those diseases. And so they had a very interesting division called... I think it was called technology... no, technology and management, anyway, it was kind of the business division of PATH's products. And so basically, it was social marketing, so it took products that were distributed, or that were made for a health purpose, and then figured out all the aspects around distribution and things like that, and I started working in that program. And there was another woman there, who was my boss, named Sarah Tifft, who had a master's in public management from Yale, and so had -- it was this, it was the business-ey area of PATH. And there was a fund there called the Fund for Technology Transfer, that was basically not really utilized, we had gotten this money from the Ford Foundation to make loans, and it was a way of work that was similar to Grameen but not really, but all of that information that I had around Grameen and how it worked came in handy. And so they really didn't have a position, but they created a position for me. And actually, what's interesting is they actually interviewed both Alan and I, and they wanted to hire both of us, and they could only hire one. And they ended up hiring me, though it was very, very close. And I almost think they might have asked us what to do and Alan might have said, "Well, you take it," kind of thing. [Laughs] But, we've always had these very parallel experiences, but anyway, that's how that came about.

And so that, I initially wasn't managing the fund, I was just working on a number of different social marketing projects, which was everything from social marketing of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV in Indonesia, to towards the end I did a one-month training in Vietnam for the Ministry of Public Health, on social marketing, and the concepts of social marketing in the context of AIDS again. But then took over the Loan Fund, and we went from having, I think, $1.5 million to having about six million dollars that we were lending out to socially responsible projects in different countries, which were clinics, we had a clinic in the Gambia rural clinic, we had a manufacturer in Mexico that was manufacturing this once-a-month injectable contraceptive called Cyclofem, we had this Vietnam social marketing project. So a lot of different things. It was really interesting, I got to travel a lot, I got to go back to India a lot. I worked on the Safe Birth Kit that was in Nepal, actually, and it was just, you know, the incidence of neonatal and maternal tetanus is very, very high, and huge, huge amount of morbidity and mortality from both of those things. And so this was just a very simple birth kit that the traditional midwives could use that had a clean needle and clean thread, and just very basic stuff. It was a huge success and the World Health Organization ended up adopting that model of traditional birth kits throughout the world, and replicating it in Africa and other places.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.