1. 28 Population Connection — March 2016
A Closer Look at an
Excellent Advocate:
Marie Lina
From a young age, Marie Lina Excellent was
passionate about helping others. As a child,
those close to her referred to her as “Attorney
Marie Lina” because of her aspiration to
become a lawyer, and because she was always
defending and standing up for her friends
and family.
Marie Lina is a Fulbright Scholar from Haiti
in her final semester of the master’s program
Field&Outreach
From Lobbying to Grassroots Outreach,
Marie Lina Excellent Shines
ByRebeccaHarrington
I
n addition to flooding Capitol Hill for a day with committed and well-
prepared constituents, our annual Capitol Hill Days (CHD) event is a
valuable time for us to form relationships with activists who will continue
their advocacy with Population Connection once they return home.
When Marie Lina Excellent,one of our CHD 2015 participants,reached out
to us about organizing an event on the University of North Carolina (UNC)
Chapel Hill campus, we were very pleased and encouraged that we had made
a solid connection through our CHD outreach.
Marie Lina is a medical doctor, trained in her native Haiti. She is also a pub-
lic health student at UNC, and serves as co-president of the Public Health
Leadership Student Association (PHLSA).
She says, “In April 2015, I had the opportunity to attend Population
Connection’s Capitol Hill Days. It was such an inspiring event that when I
went back to UNC I suggested to a couple of student organizations that a
collaborative event with Population Connection would help us bring more
awareness about reproductive health and the challenges of foreign policy to
campus.”
So, in January, we worked with the Public Health Student Leadership
Association, the Student Global Health Committee, and Carolina BEBES
(a campus organization that supports the Carolina Global Breastfeeding
Institute) to organize a screening of the documentary Vessel.
While in Research Triangle, we also had the opportunity to host a well-
attended film screening and discussion of Blessed Fruit of the Womb with
several groups at the UNC School of Medicine,and to host a grassroots advo-
cacy training with Partners in Health Engage at Duke University.
As always, we were encouraged by the strength and commitment of our sup-
porters in North Carolina, and look forward to our future collaborations with
these groups and other volunteers in the state.

2. www.popconnect.org March 2016 — Population Connection 29
in Public Health Leadership at the UNC
Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global
Public Health. She returned to school
for her MPH because through her medi-
cal work, both in Port-au-Prince and in
remote parts of Haiti, she realized that
she could have a greater impact by doing
public health work with the “larger
community.”
Her interest in public health was first
piqued during epidemiology courses in
medical school, and continued to grow
through her work as the Director of
HIV/AIDS and Community Health
Programs at Saint Damien’s Hospital in
Port-au-Prince.
It’s hard to focus on HIV prevention
without talking about reproductive
health, and at Saint Damien’s, Marie
Lina also ran a family planning program
that provided education and services,
along with free contraceptives and con-
doms.Marie Lina notes that the “beauty”
of the program was in its comprehen-
siveness and its ability to support women
who were unable to “negotiate condom
use” with their partners.
In providing information about all the
various methods of contraception and
providing a wide variety of supplies,
women were able to choose what option
worked best for them. As Marie Lina
says, “It’s your health; it’s your body; it’s
your life; it’s your choice.”
Marie Lina also implemented a strat-
egy to bridge her family planning and
HIV prevention work. At first, only two
of her staff were allowed to distribute
family planning information and sup-
plies. Marie Lina made a change to that
policy so that every provider—whether
working in the HIV prevention pro-
gram, the family planning program, or
the community health program—had
condoms available in his or her office,
to avoid “missed opportunities” in pro-
moting sexual and reproductive health
to patients. Once each patient’s primary
reason for their visit was addressed, they
were offered condoms, which led to an
uptick in their use among the hospital’s
patients.
Marie Lina reflects that running the
family planning program was “a great
experience to learn about the barriers
that women face when it comes to family
planning—all the taboo and the stigma
surrounding it” and that “the benefits
of reducing numbers of births—when
women want this as an option—is really
beneficial.”
Her “wake-up call to strengthen her
public health background” came follow-
ing the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This
event was the catalyst for her transition
to becoming a public health professional.
While clinical care was obviously essen-
tial in the earthquake’s aftermath, public
health was the greater issue, because at
that time “not one patient, but an entire
population was screaming for help.”
Around the time of the earthquake,
Marie Lina had a dream which caused
her to ask herself “am I going back to
school?” In the dream, she was walking
through an unfamiliar place, and heard a
voice telling her that she was in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina. She had never
heard of Chapel Hill,and when she woke
up, she researched the name, and discov-
ered information about UNC. Several
years later, she enrolled in UNC’s public
health program. She says her subcon-
scious fortune telling was “a wonderful
dream that became a wonderful reality.”
We feel fortunate to have met Marie
Lina, and are grateful that she has dedi-
cated her career to promoting the health
of women, men, and children every-
where. We look forward to having her as
one of our volunteers for a long time to
come!