Amish Dave

Walking briskly along Posvar Hall’s fourth floor on a February evening in 2004, Pitt Honors College student Amish Dave felt anxious.

With strong support—morally as well as logistically—from his college’s dean, G. Alec Stewart, Dave had devoted countless hours over 18 months developing a new honors course on civil disobedience. Dave even drafted the syllabus himself, convinced that a university of Pitt’s size and status needed a course introducing undergraduates to the ideas of noncomformist philosopher/activists like Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela.

Now that the course had been approved, Dave worried (to paraphrase a 1960s countercultural query): What if they offered a class on civil disobedience and nobody came?

“With the Iraqi war under way, I thought such a course would be especially relevant,” explains Dave, who will graduate today with a B.S. in neuroscience and biology (with a chemistry minor), a B.A. in history with honors, and a certificate in conceptual foundations of medicine—with an overall grade average of 3.93.

“Whether or not my fellow students supported the war, I had the sense that many didn’t know how to register their support or opposition. I thought a new course, documenting the history and ideas of peaceful disobedience in America and elsewhere in the world, would really contribute to the University community.”

Dennis Brutus, Pitt professor emeritus of Africana studies and a former colleague and prisonmate of Mandela’s in South Africa, agreed to teach the new course. But Dave wondered: Would students sign up for it? Even if they did, would it intrigue, challenge, provoke—or just bore—them?

“You never know with a new course,” Dave says, which is why he visited Posvar Hall on that February 2004 evening to find out. Ironically, his demanding academic workload prevented Dave from enrolling in the course he’d created, but at least he could sit in on a class meeting to see how it was going.

“I remember turning a corner in Posvar Hall, and suddenly hearing this excited noise coming from a classroom a few doors down the hall, all of these people talking and debating,” recalls Dave. “I thought, ‘Is that the civil disobedience course?’”

It was.

Dave felt proud and exhilarated that evening, listening to Brutus and his students discussing, sometimes heatedly, the morality and practicality of peacefully breaking the law. That experience helped inspire Dave to push for another new Pitt honors course on another controversial subject. History of Tibet, first offered in fall 2005, included an examination of Tibet’s subjugation by China.

Dave’s commitment to minority issues and human rights, together with his academic achievements and leadership potential, recently won him a 2006 Humanity in Action (HIA) fellowship from the Humanity in Action Foundation. See story in the April 17 Pitt Chronicle, available here.

He plans to attend the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine to complete an M.D./M.P.H. and then pursue a career combining emergency medicine with clinical research—interests that he explored last summer while working on a Centers for Disease Control-funded study of HIV/AIDS screening in the ERs of Oak Forest and Cook County Hospitals in Illinois.

It was an eye-opening experience, Dave says.

Of the emergency-room patients who underwent the standard test for HIV/AIDS—which involves drawing a blood sample, sending it away for lab analysis, then waiting an average of two weeks for results—only 22 percent returned to the hospitals to find out whether they were HIV-positive, the study found. “The common assumption is that many people are afraid to learn they’ve been infected, so they simply don’t come back for their test results,” Dave points out. “Whatever the reason, a 22 percent return rate is pretty horrendous from an epidemiological perspective.”

In contrast, Dave and his colleagues found they could provide results to 100 percent of people tested in the ER for HIV/AIDS when they employed a new test that involves a pinprick and dissolving blood drops in a solution. Based on the change of color in the solution, doctors know within minutes whether the patient is infected.

“Learning that this new, rapid-results testing wasn’t being implemented across Illinois was an eye-opener for me, and it reinforced my commitment to eliminating healthcare inequities,” Dave says. “That whole experience also made me see the importance of emergency doctors as being at the forefront of disease prevention and serving people who lack access to health care—that is, people who see a doctor only when they get sick enough to have to go to the ER.”

While living in Chicago last summer (he grew up in the city’s western suburbs), Dave also served as a research assistant on a project examining medical treatment of Cook County Jail prisoners. Currently a volunteer at UPMC South Side Hospital’s Rehabilitation Unit, Dave also has volunteered at Glen Oaks Hospital in Illinois and was a research volunteer at the Pitt Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Dave’s list of service goes on. President of Alpha Epsilon Delta, the preprofessional sciences honors society, he designed and implemented the first mentoring program for Pitt freshmen interested in careers in health and research sciences. Dave also has served as president and vice president of Pitt’s Asian Students Alliance.

His drive to eliminate inequalities based on class, race, and ethnicity hasn’t been limited to the United States. In summer 2003, Dave served at the Blagoevgrad Children’s Home in Bulgaria, teaching English and computer literacy skills, and trying to break down divisions among children of ethnic Bulgarian, Turkish, and Romany (Gypsy) backgrounds. “I even tried teaching them to play baseball—not very successfully,” Dave says, smiling ruefully.

“The Romany make up about 10 percent of Bulgaria’s population, and the unemployment rate among them is about 90 percent. When you’d ask Romany children what they hoped to be when they grew up—unlike American children, who tend to have boundless dreams—they would just shrug and say they didn’t know, or didn’t expect to be anything.”

Dave had seen the same hopelessness among the poor in India. His Indian-born parents, both professionals, emigrated to the United States in the 1970s; the family occasionally returned for summer visits as Dave was growing up. It was while last visiting India, during the summer after his freshman year at Pitt, that Dave heard the amazing story of the Refrigerator Con Man.

Dave was dining out in Bhopal, site of what is commonly considered to be the worst industrial disaster in history—the Dec. 2, 1984, leak of poison gas from a Union Carbide plant that killed 4,000 people within hours; another 10,000 people sickened by the gas would later die.

Dave recounts: “People at dinner were telling stories about that day, which to people living around Bhopal is like 9/11—everybody who survived it remembers where they were at the time of the disaster. What struck me most was the story of a guy who went around from village to village after the disaster, hauling a refrigerator along with him.

“He would approach villagers, saying, ‘You’re not feeling well? I’ll take your X-ray.’ He would position a villager in front of the refrigerator, open its door for a second, and the villager would see the flash of light from inside. Then this con man would produce an old X-ray image he’d been carrying with him, and charge the villager a fee. This con was quite successful for several months.”
How ridiculous, Dave thought, mistaking a refrigerator for an X-ray machine!

“Then I realized, that was just an extreme example of how easily targeted and manipulated people are who lack good health care,” Dave points out. “Coming back to the United States from India that summer, I asked myself: Is it really that different here? After all, plenty of Americans don’t have access to health care either.”

Gazing out a window in Pitt’s Honors College, high up on the Cathedral of Learning’s 36th floor, Dave says, wistfully: “Look at that view. I love Pittsburgh. I’m already feeling nostalgic about the city and about Pitt. Every time I walk past the Cathedral these days, I’ll just stop and stare up at it, remembering all of the great experiences I’ve had here.”

Dave estimates he and his parents visited about 40 college and university campuses before he decided to enroll at Pitt. “We traveled up and down the East Coast. Texas. California. Illinois schools. It was ridiculous, and it was exhausting,” he remembers, with a laugh.

“Pitt was actually the last school I visited. I was just blown away by the opportunities here. Pitt’s neuroscience department amazed me. And I was extremely impressed by how committed the Honors College was to its students. I really felt like a person here, not a number or a statistic.”

Returning the compliment, Honors College Dean Stewart says: “Amish has a great sense of civic responsibility and deep international interests. Intellectually, he has a lot of scope, which I’m proud to say is typical of our Honors College students.”