Anne Outwater, PhD ’08My pathway to the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing started with the bombing of the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998.
I was serving as a medical officer in the Peace Corps. Our office was not far from the site of the bombing, so I—with my fellow PCMO, Edith Mpangala—was called as afirst responder.
We arrived while the flames were high. Beyond the wall was an awful sight … the rubble and then, amid it, those who had been blown up by the truck bomb, mostly young men, the guards. When we couldn’t save 12 of them, I vowed to spend the rest of my life working on prevention of such violence.
The logical way to be effective in this mission was through research. So, I looked for a PhD program that would help me sort out this life-changing experience. It came through Professor Jacquelyn Campbell’s NIH Violence Fellowship. After I completed my dissertation, “Risk and Protective Factors for Homicide Death in Dar es Salaam,” I returned to Tanzania.
I am teaching research and health communications at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences. I continue my research, step by step. After 15 years of descriptive qualitative and quantitative research, we are now on to intervention—how can violence be decreased and well-being increased in Tanzania and beyond? We are using the tools of entrepreneurship and beekeeping, and it seems to be working well!
At Top: Anne Outwater has been using entrepreneurship to address problems of crime in Tanzania.