"Not Just A Job To Me!" (A Tribute to a Dear Soul)

Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:51:18 -0400

Subject: [ The Charleston Gazette ] Story:Sandy Wells: Innerviews

June 28, 2004 Sandy Wells: Innerviews

‘This is not just a job to me’

She’s from the Bahamas, Nassau. Perfect diction and a composed demeanor reflect a refined Bahamian upbringing.

She has a long-winded, intimidating title: Environmental Toxicologist, Public Health Sanitation Division, Office of Environmental Health Services, West Virginia Bureau for Public Health. Simply put, she checks out chemicals and other substances in the environment that could hurt us.

A 12-page résumé as daunting as her title lists dozens of professional and academic achievements. Noted attributes include her “relentless drive to utilize intellect.”

You get the picture. She’s a brain. A scholar. A scientist.

At 33, Alrena Lightbourn’s broadening her intellectual horizons in West Virginia.

“I spent all my formative years in Nassau. My father was an engineer. My mother was a teacher. There were seven of us siblings. We were a middle-class family, very busy in the community. I pretty much grew up in the church.

“My mother has pretty much been the pedestal that I have leaned on my entire life. Her example as a Christian mother and a strong personality has had an impact on all her children. She was always proud of my can-do attitude. She said I always knew I would get an A, that whatever it was, I knew I could do it. Everyone in our household has two or three degrees. There was a hunger for knowledge in all of us. I can’t shake that.

“Interaction with tourists is one of the things Bahamians thrive on. We’re always outside mixing, mingling with other people. It’s not something we do because tourism is the number-one industry. We just love interacting with each other, and we carry that over to interacting with people from other countries.

“Our appreciation for diversity is overwhelming. It’s one of the things that makes me miss home the most. At home, we really don’t see color. The nation is predominantly black, and we have an internal self-government led by black people, but we interact easily with our white Bahamian cohorts.

“I almost didn’t know I was black until somebody pointed that out to me in West Virginia. I was taken off guard. Maybe someday they will realize that diversity should be appreciated.

“I didn’t grow up seeing poverty at all. When I came here, that was essentially the first time I had ever seen anybody literally sleeping on the street. If we did have people that were impoverished, somebody took them in.

“I always wanted to be a doctor. I considered prosthetic dentistry, which borders on plastic surgery. I was trying to figure out some career where I would not only be able to diagnose an issue, but go a step farther and fix that problem.

“I worked in the banking sector from 1987 to 1992. I couldn’t afford a medical degree, but I figured if I worked and saved and saved, I would be able to save enough money. After a year or two, I realized how unrealistic that was.

“But we never spoke in terms of negatives, of not being able to afford something. We always focused on working as hard as we could to get where we needed to go, a long-term vision instead of setting short-term goals. I always knew I was going off to college. I just didn’t know how.

“The first opportunity came when I had just graduated from high school. I started school early and finished early. I was only 15. That was a scholarship for a college in Alabama. My mother thought I was too young. She said I was book smart but not street smart yet.

“In 1991, historically black Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., was recruiting in the Bahamas. I went to Benedict for three years, finishing early. Before I finished, Clemson was recruiting and offered a scholarship.

“I got an internship with the Senate and went straight there after graduating. From there I went to a biomedical research program to beef up my lab skills before going into the master’s program at Clemson.

“I found I was interested in far too many things. The emphasis here seems to be to pick one emphasis. At home, it’s that you need to be a jack of all trades. So I’m constantly looking for ways to connect something I did before with something I’m doing now. Everything I’ve done before has fed into what I’m doing now, and I’m constantly looking for the next step, the next thing to advance toward.

“At Clemson, I engaged in a voluntary rotation in all the labs so I could learn different research methods. The thing that got to me was, I come from a very proud race. You don’t touch mice. They’re rodents. But if I wanted that degree, I had to feed them and clean their cages. I had to cut them open and cut out organs and analyze tissues. Our species was the deer mouse, and they jump all over the place. It’s hard to hold onto them, and they’re tiny and frightening, and I would have my heart in my hand.

“I got my master’s in environmental toxicology, which fed my curiosity about birth defects and their causes. Two weeks out of Clemson, I got a job with an environmental company in Aiken, S.C. After a year, I moved to Atlanta to fill a position with the Corps of Engineers. They were looking for technical support at the EPA Region 4 headquarters office so reviews that were done would be unbiased.

“I was in Atlanta from 1999 to 2002. The contract with the corps and EPA had ended, and we had just gone through Sept. 11. I experienced firsthand the impact Sept. 11 had on federal funding, which was my bread and butter. Their budget was being cut to accommodate assistance needed in New York, and we weren’t going to have a renewal.

“I still wasn’t a permanent resident, just an authorized specialty occupation worker. If your job goes away, it throws you out of status unless you have paperwork pending. Fortunately, I had other paperwork pending and was able to utilize that time to find another opportunity, and that was the opportunity here.

“I look for ways to protect human health by determining the types of exposures people are having to either environmental chemicals or naturally occurring substances in water, air, soil, sediment or fish. We determine the source, what chemicals would be of concern and whether the concentration is at a level to be harmful.

“This is not just a job to me. I go overboard to get the most information I can to make a justifiable decision about whether to say there is a risk. This is a difficult field. It’s not easy material to understand. If your heart isn’t in it, it’s not going to be beneficial to you or anybody else. So you tend to throw yourself into your work.

“My government is insisting that I need to consider coming back. I’m one of the first environmental toxicologists they have, if not the first, and I am providing those services somewhere else. I came here to get an education to be able to go home and help my people. My loyalty is to my country.

“If you are going to have any kind of clout, it’s best to go back with a Ph.D. than a master’s. Again, I thought I would work and save the money to do that, but it doesn’t work. Imagine living in someone else’s country on a single paycheck. Taxes eat up everything.

“We were always taught never to lose sight of our goals. That’s a commitment I have to myself. I owe it to myself to be the best I can be every step of the way. I have never failed myself.

“There is a notion that you need a lot of support around you, but if you really want to see how somebody thrives, stick them out there on their own and see how they swim or sink. One of the things I thank my mother for every day is the fact that I had all the preparations I needed to survive in somebody else’s country.”

To contact staff writer Sandy Wells, call 348-5173 or e-mail [email protected].

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