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There are places on the map farther from the Bronx than southern Sudan. But culturally, psychologically, Tracy O’Heir might well have been returning to another planet when she started graduate school on the Rose Hill campus in fall 2004.
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| Tracy O’Heir |
“There is a very big difference between those two places,” said O’Heir, 32, laughing about the culture shock she experienced after working for two years in a Sudanese education program for people displaced by war. Most striking to her? “Seeing how many choices there are in the grocery store,” she said. “It’s kind of overwhelming.” Also jarring, she said, was the intrusion of advertising into every aspect of American life.
O’Heir, who is receiving an M.A. through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ International Political Economy and Development program (IPED), will not be present to accept her diploma. Currently in Harare, Zimbabwe, interning with Catholic Relief Services (CRS), she will move to Sudan on graduation weekend to take a new position with CRS, coordinating the activities of several non-governmental organizations—rebuilding schools, training teachers, building up the marketplace and small businesses. It will be, she said, “a real job.”
A native of Chicago, O’Heir studied social work at Saint Louis University, then spent two years with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Houston. That led her back to Chicago, to work with African refugees resettling in the Windy City. And from there, it was a logical progression to the Jesuit Refugee Service and Sudan.
The deep commitment to social justice that she cultivated as an undergraduate at Saint Louis University has sustained O’Heir in the 10 years since she graduated. As a Jesuit Volunteer in Houston, O’Heir visited the University of Central America in San Salvador, site of the 1989 murders of six Jesuits and their two lay colleagues. That experience “got me thinking about the things people have to live through and risk to do what’s right,” she said. Drawing on that example, she knew that Africa was “somewhere that I could do something good and learn about myself.”
O’Heir’s decision to apply to graduate school at Fordham—she studied for the GRE at night by flashlight in her room in Sudan—was an easy one. She was familiar with the program and the Jesuit tradition of being men and women for others. That she was ultimately awarded IPED’s International Peace and Development Travel Scholarship to work in Zimbabwe this semester was icing on the cake. After 18 months of study in the Bronx, she returned to a place with no television or television advertising, a place where your choices at the market are limited to whatever is available that day, if anything. And for this, she is grateful.
“I will stay here as long as it takes or as long as I take to it,” said O’Heir, whose family has been enormously supportive of her open-ended commitment to the people of Africa.
O’Heir’s younger sister Julie, who will graduate from Saint Louis University this month and spend a year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Washington, D.C., visited Africa for three weeks in 2004. It was her first trip outside the United States.
“When we arrived, it was a little overwhelming,” she said, but her sister’s demeanor was a source of comfort. “Tracy was calm and very reassuring.”
Not surprising for someone Julie describes as never allowing obstacles to keep her from doing the things she really wants to do.
“This is my journey,” said O’Heir, “and I keep seeing what the next step is.”
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