Staff Profile: Maria del Carmen Miranda
After listening to Maria del Carmen Miranda talk passionately about her work in family planning and reproductive health, the following revelation may come as a surprise. “I always knew... that I wanted to be a medical doctor,” she explains. “I wanted to be maybe a hand surgeon or a cardiologist… but nothing related to OB/GYN or Public Health!”
Miranda has been the Resident Advisor for MEASURE Evaluation in Honduras since 2005. Although she points out that she has not been directly involved in delivery attendance, her career trajectory demonstrates a clear interest in serving women and families.
After receiving her doctorate in medicine from Mexico’s Universidad de Yucatan in 1972, Miranda returned to her native Honduras to practice medicine. In order for her medical license to be recognized in her home country, though, she had to do a year of social work.
Miranda had already completed a year of social work in Mexico, so she was interested in the opportunity to serve in a similar capacity in Honduras. When she told one of her bosses how affected she had been by the poor health conditions in rural Mexico, he said, "You have to see the poor people and their health conditions in the rural communities of Honduras, your own country." Miranda followed her boss’s instructions, and she was surprised by what she learned. “I saw mostly poverty and inadequate sanitary conditions,” she says. “No access to family planning, no access to safe water and waste disposal, no access to education, including health education, and mostly underemployment and marginality.”
She watched these conditions play out in the clinic. “Sometimes, I used to see children with very dirty and long fingernails in the clinic,” she says. “I would advise the mothers to cut and clean the fingernails of their children, but when I visited the communities where they lived, I realized that no one in the community even had scissors to cut the nails, and that they did not have access to water in house, so they had to carry it from far away water sources under difficult road conditions.”
These experiences forced her to reflect on health conditions in Honduras and the need for serious professionals committed to improving such conditions in rural areas of her country.
“Maybe instead of being a private medical doctor for reasons I thought before,” she says, “I would be a medical doctor to help improve the health conditions for more people in my country. Instead of wanting to be a medical doctor for few, I wanted to be a medical doctor for many.”
With that desire in mind, she received a Master of Public Health from the University of Puerto Rico in 1976. After graduating, Miranda returned to her home country and worked for 10 years at the regional and central levels of the Ministry of Health of Honduras. For the next 17 ½ years, she followed through on her new commitment to public health by working at USAID supporting the Honduran Family Planning Association. She absorbed herself in the issues and practicalities of family planning by directly involving herself in every step of the process of the program – from project and program design to the coordination of the execution, monitoring and evaluating program activities, providing technical assistance to increase the coverage, and access of women and men to sustainable and high quality reproductive health and family planning services.
Before joining MEASURE Evaluation, she worked for 2 ½ years at UNFPA/Honduras as Reproductive Health Sub-Programme Manager on activities related to FP/RH, HIV Prevention, Gender Equity and Adolescent Support.
While working for USAID, Miranda heard about MEASURE Evaluation. It wasn’t until 2001, when she attended a workshop sponsored by MEASURE Evaluation in Costa Rica, though, that she learned extensively about the organization’s activities. She was intrigued.
In mid 2005, MEASURE Evaluation contracted Miranda to be Resident Advisor in Honduras. Four years later, Miranda speaks candidly of the gratification she finds in her work. “I like MEASURE Evaluation,” she says, “because the project is so committed to improving information systems and using the data for decision making to improve the health of the Honduran population.” She relishes her interactions with MEASURE colleagues from headquarters and around the world. “Every time I attend meetings with them, I improve my knowledge and motivation,” she says.
