By SUSIE SPITLER
For the Record Herald
Courtesy of the Weekly Record Herald; Printed 5.27.12
WEST MILTON — Joyce Ann Harley Doan was named the 2012 Hall of Honor recipient at the 124th annual Milton-Union Alumni Banquet on May 19.
Doan graduated from Milton-Union in 1961. She received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Case Western Reserve University.
While in nursing school, she met medical student Roscius Doan, whom she married in 1966. Together they started married life on the U.S. Peace Corps staff in Peru, where she helped her physician husband as a nurse. In 1968, they moved to Seattle and settled there. Mr. Doan did further nursing graduate study at the University of Washington, then participated in the formation of Cancer Lifeline, becoming its first director.
In 1979, the couple became the parents of a daughter, Marisha Elizabeth, at which time Mrs. Doan became a full time mother, homemaker and “career” volunteer. During the 1980s and ’90s, she founded the Sharehouse, which became a project of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. She also was an active board member of the Seattle Tashkent Sister city Association. Together with her husband and daughter, she made several trips to Tashkent in Soviet Uzbekistan, and hosted several Soviet visitors in her home in Seattle.
She and her family spent a year as a guest resident in Tashkent and became a successful English teacher. Her home became known as the “Seattle Consulate” where many Uzbek and Russian friends and students would drop in. Joyce also was instrumental in operating the first email connection to Tashkent through the antiquated phone lines to connect to the server in Moscow. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she and her family lived for a year in Moscow while her husband served as director for Project Hope.
After returning home to Seattle, Mrs. Doan helped a young Tashkent medical student Akor Rokhmedov, who had suffered catastrophic facial injuries from a fireworks accident. She rallied the resources of the STSCA, Providence and Harborview hospitals to bring Akhror and his surgeon to Seattle reconstructive surgical facilities. For this work, she received the Seattle King County chapter American Red Cross 1997 Hero’s Breakfast Medical Award, shared with Harborview Plastic Surgeon Dr. Gruss.
Mrs. Doan had to face the constant pain and frustration of a progressive disease in her later years. She passed away in November 2002. Accepting the award in her honor was her brother, Gerald.
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