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Andy Silver, MA, MSPH, is a retired unAmerican epidemiologist. In 1965, horrified by reports of American atrocities in Vietnam and the overwhelming public support for them, he decided that he was living under enemy occupation and that revolution was necessary. First, he volunteered to work with SNCC in Clay County, Mississippi on voter registration and a school boycott. Then he entered law school at the University of Washington, where he became president of SDS. In 1966 he was drafted after writing a letter to his Nashville, Tennessee draft board condemning the war of aggression in Vietnam. Not being arrested immediately after refusing conscription in Seattle, he took a bus to Vancouver, BC. Mr. Silver eventually arrived in Israel, where he became a citizen, attended the Hebrew University, and served in the IDF. After 13 years he left Israel as a matter of conscience, refusing to be part of an apartheid system. He found a cheap flight to Bangkok, and then settled in Chiangmai, Thailand. In 1989, he brought his wife and three children to Chapel Hill, NC. He did not wish to leave Chiangmai, but it was necessary to bring the family either to the US or to Israel for the children to receive education beyond the sixth grade. Finding that a minimum wage no longer was a living wage, as it had been in the sixties, he entered graduate study at the University of North Carolina, where he was able to obtain student loans. He graduated with an MSPH in epidemiology at the age of 55, then worked ten years with a quality improvement organization in North Carolina. In 2010 he returned to Thailand, where he worked voluntarily 8 years with the Karen Department of Health and Welfare, initiating a quality improvement program in mobile health clinics inside occupied Burma. The clinics are staffed by refugees trained by volunteer oversees health professionals in refugee camps.
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