Gallatin’s Nikki D’Errico Uses Personal Experience To Promote Empowerment in Others

By James Devitt

Nikki D’Errico arrives for her interview smartly dressed for inclement weather and having just opened an Individual Retirement Account. From this encounter and over several conversations, one learns that preparation—for things large or small—is deeply ingrained in her makeup.

Fortunately for others, she has made it her life’s goal to promote this sense of readiness in those around the world who need it most.

D’Errico, who graduates today from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, has joined the Peace Corps, which she has wanted to do since her days as a high school student in Garden City, Long Island. The Peace Corps assigned D’Errico to Morocco, where she would continue her work as a doula, providing emotional and physical support to Moroccan women during pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum. So ready for the challenge of working in that country, she began having dreams in Arabic, even though she doesn’t speak the language.

But in mid-April, D’Errico was told the Moroccan program had been cancelled and that she would be going to Moldova. Instead of learning Arabic during three months of intensive language training, she’d be focusing on the two R’s—Russian and Romanian.

The poorest nation in Europe, Moldova lies between Ukraine and Romania. Here, D’Errico will design and implement a health education and life skills curriculum for teenage students. She also still hopes to work as a doula, which she began doing last summer. In this capacity, she’s assisted women at three births.

“Women’s reproductive health is very important to me,” says D’Errico, who graduates with a concentration entitled Narrative for Empowerment and Healing. “As a doula, my role is to help a woman and her partner create a birth plan and then encourage them to remember their goals while they have someone in a white coat standing over them claiming they know more about the woman’s body and her pregnancy than she does. Women too often make fear-based decisions during labor instead of knowledge-based decisions.”

D’Errico traces her commitment to patient empowerment to both a Gallatin course taught by assistant professor Brad Lewis, who is also an M.D., and a personal tragedy. The course, “The Philosophy of Medicine,” emphasized the role patients can and should play in their own health care. But in D’Errico’s sophomore year, prior to taking the class, the significance of patient empowerment became very real—her mother, Kathleen, was diagnosed with cancer.

“When I’d go to the hospital, I saw first-hand the problems of doctors taking decisions out of their patients’ hands,” she says. “For example, they’d ask perpetually about swelling, aches, pains, but never about her grief. This brings it back to measurements—why didn’t they feel her grief played just as much of a role in her disease as her collapsed veins? Is it because doctors don’t have a scale to measure grief?”

D’Errico’s mother passed away last May, but D’Errico has continued—in fact, expanded—her commitment to instilling personal empowerment in others.

Since her sophomore year, she has been working with New York City adults to develop basic literacy skills. Along with other Gallatin students and faculty, the effort has resulted in an annual publication, the Literacy Review, a journal of writing by adult students in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), Basic Education, and G.E.D. programs in the city. And in January, D’Errico began volunteering at the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, where she works with survivors to learn to read and write in English.

Now, D’Errico takes her experience, education, and energy to Eastern Europe, where she will undoubtedly make her mark.