As a formal discipline, health and human rights is a relatively young field. This can present certain difficulties for us as students. The connection between health care and human rights is often never addressed in the classroom or in our clinical rotations.
Experienced mentors are difficult to find and our access to leaders in the field is often limited.
However, along with these difficulties are a number of opportunities. Because health and human rights is relatively new the directions it will follow in the future are yet to be determined. As future leaders, the contributions we make to the field will have a great deal of influence in defining its scope and structure. As one of the first doctors on the scene, Sheri worked almost non-stop administering first aid and assessing the scope of the human rights crisis. She also began to read about the atrocities happening in Croatia and then Bosnia, and realized that it was hypocritical to work at the Holocaust Center, preserving the memory of that genocide, and to ignore it when people again were being killed for their religion.