24 



at night, not having bathed for about a week, working her 

 way from Pakistan here. I met her, and finally got her 

 installed in the graduate students' living place. They had 

 a big sort of dormitory for graduate students and their 

 families. Harvard had, and I managed to get her into that. 



So that was one of the things I'm proudest of about 

 the center was this wonderful woman, getting her started and 

 getting her under way. 



Another woman who I got to know quite well and spent a 

 lot of time with, one of our first fellows at the center, 

 first senior fellows, was a woman named Laila Hamanasy. She 

 was an Egyptian who was a professor of sociology at the 

 American University in Cairo. 



Harold Thomas and I had spent some time in Egypt at 

 that time working on problems of the best use of the Aswan 

 High Dam. The basic problem was how much power to produce 

 versus irrigation, to maximize the benefits, how you could 

 release the water to get steady power as much as possible 

 and at the same time to vary the release for irrigation. 



We came across Mrs. Hamanasy, Laila, and we talked her 

 into coming to the center for a year, and she did, with two 

 of her children. She had taken a Ph.D. at Cornell in 

 anthropology, and she was known at Cornell as the "passion 

 flower of the Nile"! Not because she was immoral but just 

 because she looked like a passion flower. By this time she 

 looked like a sort of fat Nefretiti. Not too fat, but 

 plump. A beautiful woman. Very noisy, very talkative. 



Since then she has more recently been working for the 

 ON in their Social Science Research Center in Geneva. She 

 has done that for several years now. I also got her into 

 the Pugwash movement, and spent some tine in Egypt with 

 them, with her and her husband. Her husband was a professor 

 in the medical school at the University of Cairo, the head 

 of the orthopedics department of the medical school, and a 

 very fashionable and well-supported physician. 



She was starting a project in Egypt, which we helped 

 somewhat with, of factors affecting birthrates and fertility 

 in Egyptian villages from a sociological point of view. She 

 had a lot of students working on it in the American 

 University in Cairo. She had an assistant, a man, who 

 started there as an assistant professor and eventually took 

 her place as professor of sociology. This was a very well 

 worked-out and very respectable project scientifically, as 

 it should have been with her background. 



Sharp: Did she go back to Egypt then afterwards? 



Reveller Yes, she went back after that and started on this project. 



Ellen Revelle Eckis added this note during her review of the 

 transcript: "Actually there were two apartment buildings, in Boston, 

 with various size apartments, for international students, of the School 

 of Public Health." 



