The Authors
Photo: Monte Dodge
Mary Murphy
Mary Murphy grew up in a large family near Washington, D.C. Following college and a year of teaching, she wanted to learn more about the world and served two years in the Peace Corps as an English teacher and community health worker in Nepal.
Soon after returning to the United States, she accepted an invitation to work in the Dhorpatan Health Project in west Nepal.
When the project ended over two years later, she and Mike Payne married, moved to England, and welcomed the birth of their daughter, Jessica. On their return to the United States, Mary earned a nursing degree and a master’s degree. Since then, she keeps learning about and working with healthcare system challenges and opportunities, especially in rural areas. Her public health and independent consulting work helped establish and expand primary healthcare services in many underserved communities in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California. She currently serves as a board member of a public hospital district and as a volunteer with nonprofit organizations in her rural community.
Mary has presented at state and national conferences on community healthcare and has coauthored research articles in Women and Health, Journal of Adolescent Research, and Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Her 1983 article published in Journal of the Institute of Medicine (Kathmandu) was based on her 1975 interviews with Nepalis and Tibetans in Dhorpatan about their health beliefs and practices.
Far from the Road is her first book.
Photo: Michael Anthony
C. Ross Anthony
C. Ross Anthony grew up in Oklahoma, and after graduating from Williams College, his interest in public service, Asia, and mountains led him to join the Peace Corps in Nepal.
In the Peace Corps, he worked as an agriculture extension agent but became interested in healthcare as a vehicle to make a difference in Nepal. This led Ross to envision and found the Dhorpatan Health Project.
After leaving Nepal, Ross completed his doctorate in economics, got married, moved to Oregon, and taught economics at the University of Oregon. A Robert Wood Johnson fellowship at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) brought him to Washington, D.C., and a career in public service in and out of government.
After OMB, Ross served as Assistant Administrator for Program Development at the Health Care Financing Administration (now CMS) of the Department of Health and Human Services and was responsible for regulatory policy development and research for the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Later, as Director of the Office of Development Resources for USAID/Europe, he directed six divisions responsible for program design of Eastern European countries that broke free from communism.
For the last twenty years Ross has worked at RAND, the nonprofit think tank. At RAND, Ross led numerous programs and projects and served as professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Among others he directed RAND’s Global Health Initiative and the Center for Domestic and International Health Security. He has led projects on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, health reform of Qatar and Kurdish Region of Iraq, and healthcare and nation building.
Ross has served on numerous boards and commissions including the U.S. President's Task Force to Improve Health Care Delivery for Our Nation's Veterans and WHO subcommittee of the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. He has multiple publications to his credit, appeared on numerous media outlets, and testified before Congress on multiple occasions.
Photo: Mary Anne Mercer
Stephen Bezruchka
Stephen Bezruchka grew up in Toronto, Canada, the son of immigrants from Ukraine. He became a mountaineer in the 1960s, spent a year in Nepal, where he wrote the first trekking guidebook to Nepal, and then attended medical school. He transformed his goal to train local people to provide needed medical services in remote regions of Nepal. The opportunity to join the Dhorpatan Health Project was ideal. This experience enabled him to later train Nepali doctors in a remote district hospital setting in Nepal. His subsequent efforts in Nepal were to collaborate with Nepalis to work on issues they considered important. These included improving surgical services in remote hospitals and supporting burn care. As he recognized the limitations of healthcare to improve health, he studied population health and focused on the relatively poor health status of the United States, where he now lives and works. Stephen is a member of the faculty of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle.
His book Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19’s Health Lessons for the World (2022) resulted from his unlearning and relearning about health production. His guidebook Trekking in Nepal has gone through eight editions and been translated into other languages. He also wrote Nepali for Trekkers; The Pocket Doctor: Passport to Healthy Travel and Altitude Illness: Prevention and Treatment.
More details about Stephen Bezruchka, his life and work, can be found at StephenBezruchka.com
Photo: Maxie Chambliss
Michael Payne
Following six years of working in India and Nepal, Mike Payne returned to the United States in 1977 with the idea of someday returning overseas to continue to work in rural development but with more experience in design and construction. This goal led to jobs in construction and land surveying in Oregon and a master of architecture degree from the University of Oregon.
Shortly before completing his master’s degree, Mike was hired in 1985 by the University of Calgary’s Nepal Project to conduct a feasibility study for the construction of a hospital in Manma, the district headquarters for Kalikot District in the Mid-Western Development Zone of Nepal. Mike traveled to Nepal to conduct this study and soon realized that there was no shortage of Nepali architects and engineers who were well qualified to do the study. Their knowledge of local conditions was critical in recognizing that the hospital was intended to be built in an area that was seismically active and could not be safely built. In addition, there were no roads in the area to transport the required structural materials. This experience reinforced Mike’s understanding that the effectiveness of any development undertaking, international or local, is based on collaboration and communication, as had been the case in Dhorpatan.
Mike returned to the United States and then completed his architecture studies in 1986. After working for an architecture firm in Boston for five years, he and a principal of that firm cofounded a new architecture firm there. The firm’s mission statement was “We Help Build Livable Communities.” This mission finds its philosophical roots in the Dhorpatan project, a world away but very similar in its goal to improve the lives of people where they live, through understanding the challenges they face in their daily lives.
Mike is an emeritus architect of the American Institute of Architects. In 2019, he retired to the Boston area with his wife, Jean. They spend time whenever possible with their three adult children, Jessica, Lydia, and Carter