Senior Fellow at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, Lachlan Forrow is a general internist, President Emeritus of The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship (ASF), and past Board Chair/CEO of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985 Nobel Peace Prize recipient), a founding organization of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2017 Nobel Peace Prize recipient). Lachlan’s three months as a medical student in Africa, as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow at the Schweitzer Hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, was life-transforming. Under Lachlan’s leadership, ASF has grown far beyond its original focus on supporting the Schweitzer Hospital in Africa, and has to date supported nearly 4,000 graduate students in health-related professions in year-long closely-mentored experiential service learning projects and leadership development activities, designed to increase their skills and commitment to more effectively address the health needs of underserved people in the U.S., Africa, and beyond. In his “day job”, Lachlan founded and served as longtime Director of both Ethics Programs and Palliative Programs at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
For Lachlan the best thing about Princeton was meeting Susan Reidy ‘81 (initially ’79), and their greatest joy today is Alanna Beverly Forrow, their first grandchild (June 2024). Alanna is now also his deepest inspiration for contributions to a world in which Alanna and all of her cousins, including distant cousins in Africa, will grow up safe and able to thrive.
Tony Sheldon made his first trip to Africa in 1992 to help set up internal financial systems for a Kenyan microfinance institution and did similar work over the following 25 years in Uganda, Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, South Africa, and Botswana, as well as in Kenya. Tony has also worked with microfinance institutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, primarily in the areas of business planning, financial modeling, and social performance management to several development finance networks and funders.
Now the Executive Director, Program on Social Enterprise, Innovation, and Impact and a Senior Lecturer in the Practice of Management at the Yale School of Management, Tony teaches practicum courses on social entrepreneurship, in which graduate students work with organizations in India, Brazil, and Kenya. He also teaches a social “intra-preneuship” course in the Executive MBA program. His consulting clients have included the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), ShoreBank International, and Women's World Banking. He recently joined the board of the U.S. affiliate of Echo Network Africa.
’78 has a special place in Tony’s heart because, at our 40th reunion, he (almost literally) bumped into our classmate Lynne Dennis Oliva, whom he met freshman week and who then did not speak to him again for almost 44 years. One thing led to another, and Lynne and Tony are now very happily partnered.
Born in Guyana, South America, Brian Stephenson and his family came to the United States when he was about 10. His consciousness was raised by our classmate’s People’s Front for the Liberation of South Africa and spending the summer of 1978 in The Gambia on Crossroads Africa, a cross-cultural exchange program that was a precursor to the Peace Corps and that included his group traveling from Freetown, Sierra Leone to Accra, Ghana. These experiences shaped the trajectory of Brian's engagements in Africa.
An advocate and practitioner of appropriate technology for the built-environment with a special focus on rural development with over 40 years of experience in civil / structural engineering, project management, and engineering education, Brian is the founder and President of Passion of Hope International, a non-profit based in Africa which founded DHA East Africa, Ltd., a new sustainable development consultancy based in Nairobi, Kenya. DHA’s signature project is, a 30-year master plan for Ndhiwa Municipality, a smart sustainable agricultural in Western Kenya. This model city seeks to integrate urban development within a robust agricultural economy and promises to build resilience to climate impacts, protect and restore ecosystems and biodiversity, and create a more inclusive, equitable, prosperous economy.
Brian has four adult children and four grandchildren (soon to be six). His wife, Rebecca Anita Khelseau-Carsky ‘79, is the mother of three adult children who were raised in West Africa. She is the head-teacher of the English International School in Benin Republic.
Cathy Watson has worked for four decades in Africa, arriving to be a foreign correspondent in Uganda after attending a health conference in rebel-controlled Eritrea in 1985, during which the guerrillas captured a town, and she wrote it up for The Guardian. In going to Uganda, she was also following the newspaperman she had met in Swahili classes in London where she had gone to train as a nurse after working ’78-80 in DC for Nader and the World Bank. For eight years, Cathy covered Uganda’s economic recovery, HIV epidemic, and insurgencies, Rwanda’s invasion and ensuing genocide, and Burundi’s elections, coup and turmoil, witnessing history in the making.
Married to the newspaper man and a mother of two by 1991, in 1994 Cathy swore off hot spots and switched to setting up non-profits, Straight Talk used newspapers, radio and a network of youth centers to reach adolescents about HIV, growing to have 170 staff and tackling issues like deforestation. Mvule Trust funded scholarships.
In 2011, Cathy moved to Nairobi. She was brokenhearted to leave Uganda and had no idea what to do, but an international organization hired her, and she has been there since. Initially in acute culture shock, she began a whole new phase of working on landscape restoration, nutrition, cocoa agroforestry, refugees and urban forests across the Global South.
Cathy never had a plan and was in some ways under equipped to do the things she took on but is now told by strangers in airports: “You did a good job”. It’s complicated but one thing is true: not a day passes when she doesn’t give thanks that she has had the opportunity to build a life in Africa … and that she followed William to Uganda.
