The Himalayas arc across India's northern border, insulating the country from Pakistan, Nepal and Tibet with a wall of the world's highest mountains. It was here that Joelle Tanguy climbed to the top of the world while on a 1984 sabbatical from Borland International, a software company near San Jose. Hiking the passes that separate remote mountain villages, Tanguy came face-to-face with people needing clothes, food and medicine. The experience shattered her sense of the world. "I couldn't find the relationship between the work I was doing in Silicon Valley and the people I was encountering on my travels in Asia," says Tanguy, MBA '82. "I thought, 'Whose future am I building?' "
A few years after Tanguy returned to California, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck Armenia. It seemed like the right time to act on her humanitarian urges. She faxed her résumé to Doctors Without Borders, an international medical aid group based in Paris. Within months, she had quit her job and was coordinating hundreds of volunteers in Armenia. The assignment ended, but Tanguy was hooked. She spent the next five years living out of a blue duffel bag -- a Doctors trademark -- as a field volunteer in five different countries. Now, Tanguy, a French native, is executive director of the U.S. branch of Doctors. Among her recent job duties: leading the U.S. staff in a champagne toast in October when the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize for its 28-year commitment to helping disaster victims.
Dropping out of Silicon Valley on the cusp of the information revolution might seem like an odd career move. But Tanguy finds more excitement -- and more meaning -- in her new life. In the last decade, she's motorbiked solo across East Africa, stared down the barrel of an AK-47 rifle in Somalia and talked to a TV reporter in Bosnia as bombs fell around her. She does it all with ruthless efficiency and deep compassion. John McGill, the president of Doctors' board of directors, calls Tanguy a "tender heart in a porcupine's skin."
Formed in 1971 by a group of French physicians, Doctors Without Borders -- known internationally by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières -- now brings medical relief to more than 80 countries each year. The organization has a $272 million annual budget and 2,000 volunteers. When natural or man-made disasters strike troubled nations such as Zaire, Cambodia or Bosnia, the group sets up makeshift hospitals and runs feeding programs. But unlike the famously neutral Red Cross, Doctors has an activist agenda. The organization is quick to condemn human rights abuses in the countries it serves. That practice led the Ethiopian government to eject the group in 1985; 10 years later, volunteers were forced to leave Zaire and Tanzania out of concern for their safety.
On a recent weekend swing through San Francisco to raise money and awareness for Doctors, Tanguy makes no apologies for her group's outspokenness -- or for its aggressive courtship of the news media, which some have labeled self-promoting. In a crêpe-thin accent, she blames the U.S. media for ignoring international disasters after the sensational headlines wear thin. She believes Americans would care more about genocide in Rwanda or starving children in Sudan if those stories were better reported. To land a story in print or on the airwaves, she laments, "you have to find an American angle, and a policy angle for Washington." Beyond the media, she reserves her harshest words for the pharmaceutical industry, which she believes caters to "wealthy, healthy people" -- not citizens of poor countries who may suffer from different kinds of diseases.
The quills give way to the tender heart when Tanguy talks about people she has encountered on aid missions. She tells of children who walk for days to reach feeding stations, of the hope in their eyes and the joy in watching them thrive. A realist who knows how the system works, she is also an optimist who spent five years estimating death tolls in relief camps and now says of the experience, "It wasn't at all depressing."
What did depress Tanguy was her first career. An undergraduate computer science major and holder of master's degrees from two French universities (to complement the Stanford MBA she earned in the University's joint program with France's Institut Supérieur des Affaires), Tanguy jumped to Silicon Valley after leaving the Farm in 1982. She spent seven years as a product manager before joining Doctors in 1989. For the next five years she supervised field operations in Uganda, Zaire, Liberia, Somalia and the Balkans. In 1994, she moved to New York, rented an East Village apartment and took over the U.S. office. Though she wishes now that she had become a physician, she says helping to organize post-disaster volunteer missions is the next best thing.
Colleagues say Tanguy's administrative skills, background as a volunteer and personal intensity make her an ideal fit for the senior management post. "She's a dynamo," says McGill. "She's very bright, quick, passionate, volatile at times." And energetic. Though based in New York, she spends much of her time on the road, pitching the organization, soliciting donations and volunteers, and coordinating projects in the field. In a recent week, she flew back from Kosovo, where she was working with hundreds of doctors and nurses, to seal a Wall Street contribution for $1 million.
The Nobel Prize has helped, of course. In the weeks after it was announced, donations and offers to volunteer doubled, Tanguy says. But she worries about the Nobel citation, which called the volunteers "fearless and self-sacrificing." Tanguy believes brains, not bravery, must guide the volunteers when they're working in war zones. She's also concerned that winning the honor might make staff or donors turn complacent. "I don't know that the Nobel Prize is the end of anything," she says. "I think it's a signal that the problems we deal with are getting so big that they demand worldwide attention."
Enough attention to attract more Stanford grads headed for, say, Silicon Valley? Tanguy is hopeful. Her agency is always eager to recruit talented people "questioning the merits of their lives," she says, but she knows walking away from a lucrative career can be hard. "What needs to happen is an encounter with a reality you told yourself never existed." A reality Tanguy found on the mountaintop.
Jim Tankersley, a frequent contributor to Stanford, is a senior majoring in political science.
