Aliyya El-Bindari:

Good will hunting

Common sense and compassion are the ingredients. To her, serious problems are made to be solved, with love and inexhaustible energy

Profile by Fayza Hassan

On Sidi Bishr beach in Alexandria, almost half a century ago, a very small girl in a pink and white flowered bathing suit with a beautiful ruffle played in the waves. While building her sand castles, she would steal glances toward the cabins. Suddenly she'd smile, and run happily towards a family just arriving with many children in tow. At first the little girl would ignore the members of the family and just extend her hands toward a chubby baby in its nanny's arms. The baby would smile, then gurgle. "Yes, you are beautiful," the little girl would coo back, making funny faces to the infant. Her eyes would twinkle and she would give the mother such an irresistible smile that it never failed to earn her the right to hold the baby. She did so very carefully, although the load was almost too heavy for her. She would sit on the sand for a long time, her arms wrapped around the small child, whispering little nothings into her ear, careful that no sand came into her eyes. Even when she had to surrender her charge to the nanny, she stayed around, neglecting her older sister and all her friends. The little girl was Aliyya El-Bindari, whom everyone called Poulette; the baby was my sister, who invariably shrieked every time I attempted to hold her, which I never felt like doing unless I saw her sitting happily on Poulette's lap. The little girl lived in Alexandria and, after that summer in Sidi Bishr, our paths never crossed, although news of her reached me from time to time. When we finally met, so many years later, I recognised her at once. She had the same curls, the same quick smile which made her eyes dance, and the same diminutive size. A career, a marriage, two children and a great deal of travel have fully developed the whirlwind qualities one could only guess at in the way she always skipped and jumped rather than walked when she was a child. The bottled-up energy has been channelled into many activities. El-Bindari does half a dozen things at the same time, continuously moves around, and talks non-stop. At the end of the day, she has accomplished everything she had set out to do.

Her apartment is a pure reflection of her personality, although, she informs me at once, her daughter decorated it. The flowers, the colours, the fabrics and the wood blend, then burst into a magnificent symphony which she seems to be orchestrating. Two exuberant miniature poodles, one black, the other white, constantly chase each other, their nails scrabbling madly on the gleaming wood floors. They are, one sees at once, the natural extensions of their owner's animation. Situated on the top floor of a high rise on the outskirts of Maadi, the duplex has a breathtaking view of the Nile, the city and the Pyramids beyond. El-Bindari, however, points at the slums of Dar El-Salam just below. "Look at the poor people who must live in these insalubrious surroundings. One day I'll be back, and I will see to it that they get the care they need."

That is where it all started. El-Bindari, a pampered ambassador's daughter, has worried for as long as she can remember about the poor, the destitute, the needy and the downtrodden of the world. Early on, she found a way to channel this angst into positive action. "I am a doer," she says, "not so much a thinker."

She started her career studying nursing. She had been fascinated in her childhood by the biography of Florence Nightingale and the stories of all those other women who dedicated their lives to helping the sick and the needy. She had made up her mind about what she would be long before other girls her age had even started gazing dreamily into the future. Her father, who had always advocated women's equality, actively encouraged her professional aspirations. She chose to go and study in the United States, where nursing "was an integral part of the medical profession even then", which was not the case in Egypt.

From Boston University and the Harvard School of Medicine, she returned with a PhD in Public Health. If she decided to put her expertise at the service of women and children the world over, focusing on their health, it was because she had already sensed that, wherever one went, this was the segment of the population most at risk. She came back to Egypt with her brand new credentials, and met her husband. She had always wanted to have children and the idea of marriage appealed to her, provided, of course, it did not interfere with the work that she intended to do. "Ismail," says El-Bindari, "was extremely understanding and, like me, believed that family came first. He himself worked in development, and we made a pact: we would never accept jobs that would force us to live apart." Just after her first child was born, she was offered a job with the World Health Organisation, which entailed going to live in Libya. Ismail had no objections; she accepted immediately. It is therefore with her husband and baby that she arrived in Libya, full of dreams but not really clued on the practicalities of development issues. She was to receive her training in the field, while bringing rudiments of primary health care to a small semi-rural community on the outskirts of Benghazi. This is when she was first struck with the ideas which have formed the basis of her philosophy in development. Her premise was that, as in any other endeavour, a large dose of common sense was necessary in tackling the problems of health and poverty.

One cannot, reasoned El-Bindari, single out one specific element in the development process. Health is but a symptom of poor economic and social conditions and can only be substantially improved if, and when, the quality of life improves. To achieve such a goal, poverty should be attacked on all fronts at the same time. She started dreaming up and applying comprehensive schemes long before they were adopted as fashionable theories expounded by post-modern sociologists.

Two years after her arrival in Libya, El-Bindari was moved to another the WHO office in Indonesia. There, five years of unforgettable experiences awaited her, working in public health and starting an all-encompassing community-based programme which included health improvement through nutrition, education, job creation and children's literacy classes. Several years into the programme, a front page article written by a journalist who reported on her work in Indonesia made El-Bindari an overnight star. Her patience, which bore such wonderful results, had been "publicly recognised", she chuckles. Patience is actually one of El-Bindari's key words. She uses it often and one is startled every time to hear it uttered by someone so ebullient. "Development," she says, "contrary to what many organisations would like to believe, is not like instant coffee. It takes long years of hard work to bring a project to fruition. It is a labour of love, with its ups and downs, its successes and failures. There are no immediate rewards. Many of our programmes were complete failures, but we learned from our mistakes and improved where there was room for improvement."

She gives the example of a family planning programme in Africa, where women were fitted with IUDs. There were no facilities and they had to stand in line in the open, in front of a makeshift family planning clinic. "We had great attendance the first day, then very quickly the lines dwindled." Confronted with the near failure of the programme, El-Bindari, using the common sense she says is always so helpful when dealing with real people, suggested that the women be asked why they resisted this simple method of contraception. "The women said that they felt humiliated standing in front of the clinic as passersby could readily spot female relatives and friends waiting their turn to be fitted with an IUD. There was a great deal of gossip in the village and they did not want everyone to know about their private affairs," explains El-Bindari. Private visits by the clinic's medical staff solved the problem. Fitted with the device in the secrecy of their own homes, the women were no longer reluctant to seek help in avoiding unwanted pregnancies.

El-Bindari never let success -- or failure -- stop her for long. She had to forge ahead to achieve what her long-term goal had always been: better health for women and children, better quality of life for all without discrimination. Health, mental and physical, was a human right, and she had set out to defend it across the frontiers, eliminating, as she went along, what was not essential to her cause. She had little patience with administrative chores and always favoured work in the field. "Talk to the people, ask them about their needs and their problems, they will tell you specifically, better than any expert. It is their lives that we are attempting to improve, and they have the right to participate in the process of finding the solutions." Often, according to El-Bindari, "schemes are worked out on paper and then applied from above. Many so-called experts have never visited the communities they are theorising about. Should one wonder, then, why these schemes are met with such resounding failure?" El-Bindari has spent most of her time away from well air-conditioned offices, "in the villages, with the poor of the poor, where a glass of clean water is a luxury and where lunch can be a single shared tomato, if one is lucky."

She smiles while reminiscing about some high-profile missions which, on arrival, would ask to be shown to the bathroom, and about the way they looked when informed that there were none. "Before you can help people improve their lives, you have to share their misery to really understand their needs," says El-Bindari. She has been around the world, applying her philosophy of development. She has immense compassion for the women whose burden is the greatest but whose share in the assets of any community is the smallest. She has dedicated her life to empowering women and now, having almost reached the age of retirement, she feels that there is a need for more. Having resigned her post at the WHO, she has launched herself into a teaching career. She lectures on public health at New York University, George Washington and Harvard. Moreover, she is busy establishing programmes which will allow graduate students in Africa and Asia to obtain PhDs from these universities while staying in their own countries. "It will allow a large number of students who, for economic, professional or family reasons, could not possibly afford to spend a few years as full-time students in the States, to earn degrees from prestigious universities, working mainly through the Internet."

El-Bindari spent last winter working on this new project. She will return to Egypt at the end of this month, and plans to settle here. She has been looking at several projects in public health. "There is so much to be done," she sighs, "and here, women are particularly receptive. Right after we got over the silly little knitting and crochet projects, which were never seriously aimed at creating sustainable development, we were on the right track. Now is the time to concentrate on income-generating projects, hand in hand with literacy programmes and health schemes. We have serious problems with the infrastructure and with housing, but nothing a great deal of good will cannot solve."

She is already dreaming of new programmes, tailored to Egyptian community needs, and has put out feelers. "It will work," she says happily. We are back on the balcony. Down there, Dar El-Salam seems to beckon. "I'll be back," she promises.