Story #31: Myles Lynk, Professor of Law, on His PBHA Experience

Some Recollections of My Service in PBHA – Myles V. Lynk, ’70. L ’76

My involvement with PBHA was somewhat unique. Although I am Class of 1970, I graduated from the College in May 1971. I took off my senior year, 1969-70, to serve as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) Volunteer in the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Lous, MO. During my first three years at the College I, of course, knew of PBHA–We referred to it as “PBH” back then; I attended events there and participated in small, ad hoc, volunteer activities through PBH, but I was more active in the Assoc. of African and African American Students and on the Faculty-Student Committee to Establish the Afro American Studies Dept.

When I returned to Harvard in the Fall of 1970, I joined the board of a Radcliffe College organization – Education for Action (E4A) – which supported student engagement and research in community action programs in the greater Boston area. So it was not until after I graduated from the College in May 1971 and was working as a social work assistant at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston that I really became active in PBH. Back then, PBH had a program called the Harvard Africa Volunteer Project (HAVP). Through HAVP Harvard student volunteers travelled to East Africa to work in schools as teachers, and in other social service activities, in East Africa. The program had originated as Project Tanganyika; it sent students to what was then Tanganyika before it became the independent Republic of Tanzania. By 1971 the program sent volunteers throughout East Africa, to Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. I really wanted to go to Africa, so I applied to PBH to join HAVP, and was accepted.

This was a two-year commitment—during the first year the members of HAVP had to raise the funds to pay for our travel to and from East Africa, and we also had to obtain an appointment at a school or other social service institution there that would accept us and assist or provide for our living accommodations while we were there. I was elected by the other members of HAVP to serve as the co-director of my cohort: the 1971-73 group of volunteers. (The other co-director was an outstanding woman whose name, I am embarrassed to say, I do not recall. She was terrific; she went on to be one of the leaders of ACORN, a community action organization in the U.S. during the 1970s.) This cohort also included some non-Harvard people from the community, who were admitted to HAVP, traveled to East Africa and worked there with us as volunteers. This had somewhat mixed results; some worked out well and some did not.

I also remember working with Lee Smith, the wonderful staff director (I don’t think that was her title, but it was her function) at PBH. Lee was a joy to work with; always a calm harbor amid whatever storm was going on among the students. She guided and advised us even though she let us think we were in charge. During our year in Cambridge we wrote to schools, hospitals, non-profits, etc., throughout East Africa, looking for places where we could serve. One of the places that responded favorably to our inquiries was an Anglican Church mission hospital in Uganda, the Ngora (Church of Uganda) Hospital. They wanted someone to help develop a community health and nutrition program. Given my work at Children’s Hospital in Boston, this was the placement for me! I accepted the assignment and looked forward to my year in Uganda.

At that time Idi Amin was the president of Uganda. My mother—a truly great lady and a wonderful person, a public-school teacher and administrator in New York City who raised three children in the Bronx—was ambivalent at best about me going to Africa for a year, and she certainly did not want me to go to Idi Amin’s Uganda! She tried mightily to dissuade me from going. But I persevered, in the innocence of my youth. So, in August 1972 I flew first to England, then to Kenya, and then travelled by overland bus to Uganda. I was picked up at the bus stop in Mbale by Dr John Maitland, the medical director of the hospital. He drive us to the hospital, in the small town of Ngora, in Teso District, Uganda.

My year in East Africa—while there I travelled to Kenya and Tanzania—was one of the most illuminating experiences of my life. I am in awe of the fact that I actually did travel there and spent a year working there. I tell my daughters about the sounds of distant drums at night; of how bright he sunlight was each day; how colorful the markets were; how kind the people were to me, this young and eager American; about the high grass where, yes, a leopard could easily hide; about the young children herding cattle; the deep forests where teams of woodsmen and carpenters worked—I still have a trunk they made for me which was long enough to hold a tall drum I purchased while I was there; and the night I worked in the hospital’s operating theater—a tent—pumping the anesthesia machine without electricity to keep it going while the doctors worked to remove an ovarian cyst from a young woman. In my work at the hospital I was able to get some health education manuals translated into the local languages so people could actually use them and got the hospital to plant fields of green vegetables like spinach so people could add them to their diets; we were able to get local craftsmen to make cheap sandals from old rubber tires so people had something to wear on their feet when they crossed streams and rivers in order to avoid getting schistosomiasis disease; and we were able to get some of the measles vaccine which the WHO sent to Uganda shipped to the hospital to inoculate young children against what is a deadly disease in the tropics. I also got to meet so many wonderful people! To this day, I still am in contact with some of the people I worked with at Ngora Hospital!

I left Uganda and East Africa on August 20, 1973. I started law school at Harvard on September 3, 1973. Talk about cognitive dissonance! But I persevered. And in law school I continued my commitment to community service by joining the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and serving for a year in Boston at the Dorchester Family Services Center. During my time in legal practice in Washington, DC, I was a Big Brother to two young boys, provided pro bono legal services, and supported legal services organizations when I was president of the District of Columbia Bar. My work with PBHA has been a lasting influence on my life. And now that I have returned to PBH to serve on the Alumni Board, I am reminded of an old Swahili expression: Tutaonana tena,” which means, “We shall see each other again.”

Myles V. Lynk