"ABDULl! Whatever way you feel, just tell it!”

That piece of advice from John Montgomery offered in the halls of the Taubman Center helped transform Abdul Momen’s life.

In 1978, he was an economic advisor to the Bangladeshi government with a dream — to go to Harvard.

“It’s known as the best school in the world, more so in the Third World,” he says. “Everybody knows it’s a symbol of prestige and achievements. Many senior officers, those who are bright and known to be very successful, most came to Harvard.”

That dream, once realized, propelled Momen MPA 1979 far beyond the halls of power in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. It transformed his intellectual disposition, honing an already inquisitive mind and equipping him with a new set of skills that he has used both to teach and to navigate the international economic scene. Indeed, he never went back to work for the Bangladeshi government. Currently, he’s an American expert at the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, at the Ministry of Finance in Riyadh.

But more important, from his perspective, his time at the Kennedy School gave him the confidence of his convictions and the determination to turn his compassion and beliefs into political activity.

Over the last decade, Momen has fought the sex trafficking of women and children in Asia, the sale of young Bangladeshi boys as camel jockeys in the Middle East, and now is raising alarms in Saudi Arabia about the abuse of immigrants in what are, in essence, forced labor camps.

“You find the facts and develop your position,” he says. “And once I know the facts, I can argue with anyone. This is one teaching they gave me. Whatever it is, get the facts. It has helped me all the way.”

Momen has had many small successes along the way, from rescuing 25 children in Mumbai who were about to be sold as camel jockeys, to helping push through new international laws that ban sex trafficking. But he is also frustrated with the slow pace of change.

“There have been many laws developed, but they’re not being implemented,” he says. “And most of the time, it’s the educated people, the public servants, the police and security forces, government officials who for a little money make the life of a young man miserable for his whole life. And then they get mad at me for exposing it. This I just don’t understand.”

But that hasn’t stopped him. He continues to do what John Montgomery urged him to do — “just tell it.”

The more he learned about the labor camps in Saudi Arabia, the more determined he became to expose them. He sent letters to the press and regularly called the police on abusive employers.

“In one case there were 97 employees —Bangladeshi, Indian, and Filipino and Pakastani — in one company,” he says. “These people were not paid for almost a year. So I took them to the labor court. And it took a long time for them to make the judgment, but they made it in favor of the laborers.”

But as Momen has come to learn with his work over the years, many seeming victories end up only partial successes.

“It’s been six months since they got the judgment, but the government hasn’t enforced it,” he says. “So these people are still suffering.”

Momen’s extracurricular activities have also taken a direct toll on him personally. Last year, some dignitaries visited him to learn about the labor camps. He was planning on taking them to one of the more problematic ones. But they didn’t have time. Still, after they left he received a notice from the government warning him that his activities were inappropriate.

Then came the terrorist attack in Riyadh in May. After that, he decided it was time to leave Saudi Arabia. As of this writing, he’s not sure what he’s going to do next. But it’s clear he’ll continue advocating for people who can’t speak for themselves.

“I love helping people; there are so many things to do, and I feel that I haven’t done enough,” he says. “But I know now that I can talk to anyone because Harvard gives me the background, it gives me a lot of confidence.”

There’s no doubt, he’ll continue to “just tell it!” exactly as he sees it.

...

ON THE MORNING OF September 11, 2001, Carol Raphael MPA 1979 found herself in the middle of a paralyzed, chaotic city with 1,600 very sick patients in the “frozen zone,” the area immediately around Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. There was no way to communicate and no easy way to get to them.

The police had shut down the subways and blocked streets. The electricity was off. Phone service was disconnected. Fear gripped the city as an acrid, metallic smoke and gray dust hung in the unsettlingly quiet air.

“While everyone was fleeing the downtown area, our staff was rushing in and they stayed there, even though they were frightened and they had their own families to consider,” says Raphael, the president and chief executive officer of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY). “They had an ethic, that they had a public responsibility that superceded their private interest. Their level of courage and honor was incredible.”

It was in those terrifying hours and days after the planes struck the World Trade Center that a belief that had driven Raphael’s life was reaffirmed: That government can make a positive difference in people’s lives.

“At that moment of uncertainty, the only real certainty was that people looked to their government to take care of them,” she says.

It was that belief in government that first brought Raphael to the Kennedy School in 1978. She arrived as a high school vice principal determined to assess her life and career goals. She knew only a few things for certain. She “very powerfully” wanted a job that made a difference in people’s lives, and she wanted to hone her financial and accounting skills.

Twenty-five years later, she’s confident she gained all of that and much more than she anticipated.

“At that juncture I had no sense of what the future held,” she says, breaking into a broad, engaging grin. “Nor did I have any sense of how I’d come out of the Kennedy School, not only with a wonderful network of friends and colleagues and professors whom I cherish to this day, but how much it opened up for me in terms of learning the art of the possible.”

The effects of that lesson can be seen in every aspect of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which under her skilled leadership has grown into a large, flexible organization on the cutting edge nationally of innovative practices, policy, and research in health care. When she arrived 14 years ago, it was a well-intentioned but disorganized nonprofit service with $180 million in revenues and a looming deficit.

“We had very poor systems, we didn’t even know how many patients we had,” she says.

Today, the VNSNY is the largest home health care organization in the United States, with almost $850 million in revenues and 10,000 employees who serve more than 24,000 patients annually with more than 6 million visits. Its patients range from an 8-year-old boy who needs to learn how to handle his diabetes to an 82-year-old man who can’t get to the doctor alone, as well as a 42-year-old mother of two coping with the end of life in hospice care.

Its research arm, the Center for Home Care Policy and Research, is dedicated to improving the quality of care, helping to formulate long-term care policy to cope with the expected bulge in the baby boom elderly in 2011, and to promoting and supporting naturally occurring communities of elderly.

“I believe very much in what we do,” she says. “I’m not saying there isn’t a place for nursing homes and institutions, but I believe that most people really want to be home, active in their communities, engaged with their families and friends, and that they’re more likely to recover and be motivated to recover when they’re in that setting.”

Then there’s the bottom line impact. Home care is substantially less expensive than institutional care, yet the federal government still spends 75 percent of its Medicaid long-term care dollars on nursing homes for the elderly, and only 25 percent on home health care. That’s a ratio she’d like to see change, substantially.

“But it’s complicated,” she admits. “You have nursing homes, bricks and mortar that are already built. In addition, there’s concern, if you make home and community-based care widely available…more people would tend to use it because it’s a more desirable public good.”

In order to help overcome such biases, she has turned the VNSNY into a national leader in developing innovative programs aimed at improving overall quality and providing evidence to support home care’s case in the policy arena. In the process she herself has also become a national leader. She sits on a large number of boards and committees, including the Medicare Payment and Policy Commission, which advises Congress on Medicare policy, and Robert Wood Johnson’s National Advisory Committee on Better Jobs and Better Care, which is examining long-term care and workforce issues.

But it’s when she walks into a meeting of her staff in the VNSNY’s elegant 19th century headquarters on 70th Street in Manhattan that the force of her low-key dynamism becomes most evident. Her staff shows respect and real affection. It’s clear, she’s not just a manager to report to; she’s a leader who challenges and inspires them.

“She’s always very supportive of us, and she’s very approachable,” says Stella Kwong-Wirth, director of the VNSNY’s Asian Home Care Program. “But you have to be on the ball, you have to know everything, because she always asks the right question.”

The VNSNY is the only home health care agency with a multicultural program, with Asian, Hispanic, and Russian divisions to meet the needs of New York’s growing immigrant population. It’s innovations such as these that also win her the appreciation of her staff.

That’s a product of one of the key lessons Raphael gleaned from her time at the Kennedy School. Her professor Manny Carballo made it clear that no one can do anything alone, and the real role of a leader is to inspire and motivate people.

“Part of me always resists being corny or sentimental, but you can’t underestimate the need that people have in their work life to feel connected, to feel like what they’re doing has a larger meaning than just seven hours of work,” she says.

Her time at the Kennedy School also helped her learn to make complex decisions, create systems to measure achievement and instill accountability, as well as recognize the importance of focusing on a few key priorities.

For the VNSNY, Raphael’s goal is to make the “gold standard” in the delivery of quality care and the development of new and innovative models of care. She’s also determined that the organization develop flexible systems that can identify and respond to problems even as it maintains its mission.

“If I leave here and the organization falls apart, I have failed,” she says. “It’s not you as a person, it’s your role that matters.
It’s the organizational capacity that you build that causes it to endure, to be here for the next wave of problems.”

On 9/11, Raphael saw how ready and committed her staff was to deal with the crisis that was bigger than any organization, even at its best.

“I don’t think that I fully appreciated how, when all of the structures dissolve, you ultimately rely on the individual ethics of how people regard their roles,” she says. “It goes beyond it being a job, there is a sense of having a social contract: ‘This is what I do. I rescue people in an emergency, and I don’t flee.’ To me that really was heroic.”

Alexandra Marks MPA 1991 is a senior writer for the Christian Science Monitor.