Deborah Myers is the manager of the hospital-based Breastfeeding Peer Counselor Support Project at South LA Health Projects, LA BioMed at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Born and raised in Queens, New York, Deborah was influenced by social activist camp counselors with whom she spent most of her childhood summers. After graduating from Queens College with a degree in psychology, she traveled through the heart of Central America, seeking an understanding of cultures other than her own.
Her experiences there – seeing poor campesiños, or farmers, trekking down narrow mountain paths leading donkeys laden with empty coke bottles – led her to study nutrition. At Columbia University she had the great fortune to work with physician professors in exile from the military dictatorship in Chile. From them she learned how nutrition and breastfeeding were political as well as clinical, because of the aggressive and unregulated marketing practices of formula manufacturers resulting in the death of infants in developing countries.
After receiving her masters degree from Columbia, she began work as a WIC nutritionist, and then worked with a Population Council project that demonstrated how breastfeeding rates could be increased by altering hospital practices. Later she worked on a USDA funded project that looked at model breastfeeding practices in the WIC Program.
She moved to Los Angeles in 1989 with her husband and then 1-year-old son, and began her work at South LA Health Projects, LA BioMed at Harbor-UCLA . She has been there ever since.
Which book has most influenced your life?
Moment in Peking, by Lin Yutang. As a teen, it sparked a fascination for cultures that are different from my own.
What is your idea of a perfect world?
One in which people are kind to one another and respectful of our environment.
What is the greatest challenge the children and families of LA County face today?
Poverty. The gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" is widening.
Which living person do you most admire and why?
Hard to say – up there are my yoga teacher for living what he teaches, and my son for his intellectual curiosity.
Who was your favorite teacher and why?
My high school chemistry teacher. Way back then, he knew that girls could be just as good in science as boys. |
