The prospect of writing a blog is daunting. Blogs are for opinionated people. If I am going to blog, I would like to have something worthwhile to say. I, for one, find it annoying to come away from reading a piece of writing, feeling like I have just wasted seven and a half precious minutes of my life.

Being a Global Health Corps fellow is a test of mettle. The mission of GHC – to bring about health equity because we believe that health is a human right – is an imposingly noble one. From the very beginning, (which for the purposes of this blog will be the time you learn via email that you have been accepted as a fellow) you embark on a journey of intense self-scrutiny. Once the excitement dies down a little and you are caught in a quiet moment, the questions inevitably come up. Do I have what it takes to really make it through this? What if I’m not good enough? What if I start the work and then find that I don’t have what it takes? What if I simply hate it and I just want to go back home? Would there be any honor in leaving a fellowship midway because I just didn’t have “what it takes”?

One would think that having the chance to meet so many young, innovative, accomplished people from around the world would help to ease that insecurity. After all, if I have been selected to be among this league of extraordinary gentle-folk, it must be because I am one of them, right? “Wrong,” says the voice of uncertainty. “The selecting panelists could very well have made a mistake when it came to selecting me. Maybe I just managed to fool them into believing I am extraordinary. How am I going to be able to carry on that facade for an entire year? Someone will realize sooner or later that I am a fraud and they should have given this position to somebody else.”

For the entire first week of my on-site orientation, I walked around this organization in a perpetual state of stage fright. Thankfully, it vanished sooner than I expected. Working at a homeless shelter for youth in Newark, NJ does not allow for much time to stand around, immobilized with self-doubt. As tempting as the prospect is to count my insecurities one by one, there are simply too many other things to do. Applications to complete for a youth to receive Medicaid (public health insurance), prescriptions to be refilled, hands to hold while one girl is getting a root canal, contraceptive options to explore with another girl, doctors’ appointments to set, negative STI test results to share a sigh of relief over. Every day is so fast-paced that I came home exhausted every evening for the first month. Maybe it is the nature of the work I am doing here. Or maybe it’s because in Malawi, we have a different concept of time (we see no benefit in rushing breathlessly through everything). Working here has felt like one mad rush on more than one occasion.

One of the youth I work with asked me why I came all the way from Africa to do this type of work here. I responded: “Well, we have Americans coming to help the people in Africa all the time. I think it’s only fair to return the favor.” He laughed. As much as that was a joke, it certainly touches on the very important philosophy of Global Health Corps: partnership and exchange. This is demonstrated in the pairing of an American and international fellow at each fellowship placement, and also in the variety of placement organizations in the United States and five African countries. It acknowledges that no one country has all the answers, that no one field of health care is capable of catering to everybody’s health needs, and that bringing about health equity is not only for people in the medical field.

If a person cares that young people are socially empowered enough to make responsible decisions concerning their health, then they are the perfect candidate to be a Global Health Corps fellow. In which case, I have what it takes after all. That’s my opinion.

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