Her Chapin classmates predicted in their 1982 yearbook that Erika Dailey would become a computer programmer. She described herself in those days as a “cerebral oddball,” known not only for her technological aptitude but also for her creation of a mock epic in Latin, based on Vergil’s Aeneid, which she wrote for her senior individual study project.
Her eventual career path, however, followed neither technology nor classics. It was forged by something else: an awareness of human rights and sympathy for people who are denied them. Today, she is the deputy director of international operations for George Soros’ Open Society Institute, a foundation that promotes human rights.
One of Erika’s Chapin teachers could have seen this coming. Nicky Chapin, who taught her history, recognized the seed of Erika’s passion for this field when she was still in the Upper School. It was at a lecture in Mrs. Chapin’s honor last week that Erika spoke about her work to students in Classes 8 through 12 and to faculty, staff and guests.
After graduating from Chapin, Erika studied languages at Princeton, including Russian, Georgian and Arabic. It was during a semester’s study in the then-Soviet Union that she reached a “pivotal point” in her thinking about what would become her life’s work. “It was the height of the Cold War,” she recalled, “and it was a profound personal education for me about what it was like to live without some of the civil and political rights that we all take for granted here.”
Erika returned to the Soviet Union after college and worked as a researcher and advocate with Human Rights Watch. There, she acted on behalf of two friends, a brother and sister, who had been unjustly condemned to prison for 20 years. In trying to obtain help for them, she experienced her “first big exposure to the extraordinary world of international advocacy.”
Since that time, Erika has been involved in three principal areas of human rights work: armed conflict, torture and political repression. She was sent with scant training to refugee camps in what was then newly independent Moldava, where she gathered testimony from victims of an uprising. She spent time in prisons where torture takes place. For five years, she worked in Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, where the country’s dictator embezzled billions of dollars while forcing his people, including children, into slave labor.
Now the parent of a daughter in Chapin’s Class 6, Erika expressed pride in the school for establishing a chapter of Amnesty International and suggested various fields through which her young audience might eventually pursue human rights. Aspiring attorneys should consider human rights law. Doctors can rehabilitate torture victims. Journalists are essential in revealing abuses. As for the role of the arts in righting wrongs, Ms. Dailey recalled seeing an exhibit of single shoes, set up outside the United Nations’ Geneva office, that was meant to encourage the diplomats who passed it to vote for a ban on land mines.
While acknowledging the risks inherent in working in human rights advocacy, Erika reminded her Chapin audience to think of the victims of oppression. “They are really the ones who are in a vulnerable position,” she said. Helping them requires creative diplomacy backed by careful planning and thorough political knowledge — something that Chapin prepared her to accomplish and is preparing today’s students to accomplish as well.