about

9 things about Callie

1. My phrase of the year for 2024 is: stand still and stop the sun.

2. I have a masters in Global Health and Development from University College London and started a PhD in Global Health at UCL in January 2021. My research, grounded in critical medical anthropology and qualitative methods, focuses on child death and dying from childhood cancer in Kenya.

3. I am on a path to my life’s work in international children’s end of life care and telling stories at life’s edge. It is in this that I find, as Frederick Buechner said, where my “deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

4. I have a fairly strong addiction to black coffee and lists.

5. The place and people of Kenya, and the experiences I have had since I began traveling to and living there in 2009, will forever hold my heart. It is there that I learned and became my best self and where much of my understanding of joy, compassion, relationship, commitment, and good was, and continues to be, shaped.

6. Among many other adventures I’ve been privileged to live, I also once lived in Dakar, Sénégal, volunteered amidst the refugee crisis in Italy and Greece, conducted research at Sunflower Children’s Hospice in South Africa, and worked with children at a domestic violence shelter in Indianapolis. These periods of my life and journey encompassed some of the most challenging, growing, joyful, and thoughtful moments of my living to date and I am thankful for them all.

7. Mary Oliver’s line “to be willing to be dazzled” informs 99% of how I try to live this earthly life.

8. When I was young, I told people that my hobby was laughing.

9. I believe in kindness and in justice and in living and loving within and from the belief that as a human, my well-being is bound to that of all others.