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Rachel Breman

Biography

Rachel Blankstein Breman can speak five languages - including English, French, Djerma, Spanish and Portuguese - which she acquired mostly from her travels. By age 15, she was an exchange student in Costa Rica; then attended college in Seville, Spain; worked in Angola; and was with the Peace Corps in Niger, where French and Djerma are spoken.

One of her biggest challenges and profound experiences came from living in an isolated African village and learning the local language. After two months she unlocked the language structure when she discovered Djerma was based on the mother/child relationship. Every tree and plant had the suffix "mother," and its fruits had "child" as its suffix. "This was not only a beautiful way to express one's self, the meaning behind it was powerful," she says.

Rachel wants to add to her travel and other experiences with two-year graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in public health. She then plans on applying her knowledge toward maternal and child health issues. Her goal is to work in assessing, evaluating and managing community health care programs, hopefully overseas, but perhaps among underserved populations in the United States.

Rachel graduated from Brandeis University in 1996 with a degree in Spanish, and received the honors cum laude and appeared on the Dean's List. Her first position was with Management Sciences for Health, where she served as a senior program assistant managing office issues between home and the field in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Senegal. She then went to Emory University in Atlanta, where she helped a professor write a scholarly publication titled Managing Contraception.

In October 1997, Rachel traveled on behalf of the Peace Corps to Niger as a Women's Development Agent, coordinating and managing programs and teams, including establishing a village bank that secured funding for the village.

She then went to Angola as an interim program manager with Catholic Relief Services, where she worked in a war region participating in health projects with officials from the local government, and international and NGO organizations.

After returning from Angola, she enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to complete a nursing degree.

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