Oral history interview with Rahel Nardos, 2018 March 28

Overview of the Collection

Interviewee
Nardos, Rahel
Title
Oral history interview with Rahel Nardos
Dates
2018 March 28
Quantity
77.5 megabytes, (1 online resource (1 audio file (1 hr., 23 min., 45 sec.)))  :  MPEG-4
Collection Number
SR 12286
Summary
Oral history interview with Rahel Nardos conducted by Sankar Raman and Maleya Luis on March 28, 2018, for The Immigrant Story. Nardos immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia in the 1990s to pursue a career in medicine. In 2010, she founded Footsteps in Healing, which provides health care to women in Ethiopia.
Repository
Oregon Historical Society Research Library
1200 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR
97205
Telephone: 503-306-5240
Fax: 503-219-2040
libreference@ohs.org
Access Restrictions

Collection is open for research.

Languages
English

Biographical NoteReturn to Top

Rahel Nardos was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1974. She attended the International Community School in Addis Ababa, and in 1993, she came to the United States to continue her studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After graduating in 1997, she spent two years working as a research assistant at Cornell University. She earned a doctor of medicine degree from Yale University in 2003 and completed her residency at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, with a specialization in obstetrics and gynecology. In 2010, she founded Footsteps to Healing, which provides health care to women in Ethiopia. As of 2018, she was an adjunct professor at Oregon Health & Science University and a urogynecologist at Kaiser Permanente NW, and served on the board for the Worldwide Fistula Fund.

Content DescriptionReturn to Top

This oral history interview with Rahel Nardos was conducted by Sankar Raman and Maleya Luis on March 28, 2018. The interview was recorded for The Immigrant Story, an organization that documents and archives the stories of immigrants and refugees in the United States. In this interview, Nardos discusses her early life in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, including life under communism, access to health care, and her education. She talks about her experience attending the International Community School in Addis Ababa as a scholarship student. She also talks about the famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s. She then talks about applying for college in the United States and attending Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; about the barriers to her plans to attend medical school in the United States as an immigrant; and adjusting to life in the U.S. She also shares an anecdote about her first encounter with the U.S. customs agency. She discusses the U.S. political climate at the time of the interview in 2018, including her experiences with racism. She talks about attending Yale School of Medicine, including financing her education; her reasons for specializing in obstetrics and gynecology; and settling in Oregon. She speaks about a 2018 op-ed she wrote for the Oregonian newspaper, titled "My patients don't care I'm from a 'shithole' country," and talks about the increase in racism since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. She discusses balancing family life with her career as a doctor; her work in women's health in Ethiopia with Footsteps to Healing; and her other volunteer work. She closes the interview by discussing her cultural and ethnic identity.

Use of the CollectionReturn to Top

Preferred Citation

Oral history interview with Rahel Nardos, by Sankar Raman and Maleya Luis, SR 12286, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.

Restrictions on Use

Joint copyright for this interview is held by the Oregon Historical Society and The Immigrant Story. Use is allowed according to the following statement: In Copyright – Educational Use Permitted, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/.

Administrative InformationReturn to Top

Acquisition Information

Gift of The Immigrant Story, July 2020 (Lib. Acc. RL2020-018).

Bibliography

An article about Rahel Nardos, "I Had to Earn my Way" by Maleya Luis, was based on this interview and published on The Immigrant Story website at https://theimmigrantstory.org/earn/.

Detailed Description of the CollectionReturn to Top

Description Dates
Oral history interview with Rahel Nardos 2018 March 28

Names and SubjectsReturn to Top

Subject Terms

  • Discrimination against African Americans--Oregon
  • Ethiopian Americans--Oregon
  • Immigrants--United States
  • Physicians--Oregon--Portland
  • Women's health services--Ethiopia

Personal Names

  • Nardos, Rahel

Geographical Names

  • Ethiopia--History
  • United States--Immigration and emigration

Form or Genre Terms

  • interviews

Other Creators

  • Personal Names
    • Luis, Maleya (interviewer)
    • Raman, Sankar (interviewer)