Malawi in Crisis: How did it run out of essential medicines?
Malawi currently faces several major challenges with its health care system. Delivery of care is rather poor. The techniques and prescriptions are rather antiquated. There are few properly trained health workers and skilled clinicians; and there not enough institutions to educate them than. In my opinion, the most pressing is the shortage of essential medicines, […]
RTOTTARML?
Remember that one time that ACRONYMS ruled my life (RTOTTARML)? I don’t pretend to think of this as a new phenomenon, pretty much every field, every office, every demographic has their own lingo and jargon, often riddled with acronyms to make things easier. One of my favorites is one that our colleagues in this year’s […]
Fighting Corruption – My Own Perspective
Corruption, as defined by Wikipedia, is spiritual or moral impunity or deviation from an ideal situation. Corruption may include many activities like bribery and embezzlement. Uganda has been sighted as one of the most corrupt countries in the world with Bureaucratic corruption (Bribery, Nepotism, Misuse of official positions and resources), aided by complex regulatory procedures […]
Changing the world…one story at a time
I have been thinking about stories recently, with good reason: story telling has become a big part of my life. I have become quite comfortable with telling the story of my journey into global health from the crowded pediatric clinics in the Nigerian Sahel to the bustling health department in Newark. I have had the […]
Karamoja
Hurtling down the rugged Soroti –Moroto road, I was simply excited at the prospect of a few days in a part of Uganda not many people get to see. I did not hear a thing, advice or whatever, that my supervisor said as I left my Kampala placement site for a journey I had clearly […]
Diagnosing Bukeye
I just finished reading the chapter of Jeffrey Sachs’ book, The End of Poverty, in which he discusses the idea of “clinical economics,” and his ideas resonated deeply with the reactions I’ve been having to my immersion in the rural community of Bukeye, Burundi. The essence of “clinical economics” is the idea that the world of […]
EAT. SEE. SPEAK…and LEARN
I am a huge movie fanatic and love EVERYTHING about the movie experience. What I love the most about really good films, regardless of genre or topic, is that they allow you to see the world with new lenses or travel to extraordinary places. They cause you to think, cry, laugh, get angry and hopeful. […]
All The World’s A Stage, And All The Men And Women Merely Players
When entering the non-profit world you expect low pay, little to no thanks, and to not get enticed to organizations with fancy dinners; but you expect to get fulfillment and joy and the knowledge that you are working towards something greater than yourself. Absolutely all of those things are true. However, I also got to […]
Justice is Not for Sale
“We cannot allow our women in childbirth to die in the developing world solely because we have not decided to work together.” ~Naveen Rao, Lead, Merck for Mothers Last week, in a country that shares a border with my ancestral home of India, 1,127 Bangladeshi garment laborers were killed due to inhumane working conditions. This […]
Equal Challenges
The first and second half of my fellowship could not have been more radically different for me. For the first few months, I was thrown onto a construction site in rural Rwanda. I watched each day as four houses and the surrounding landscape quickly came to completion. I met many local Rwandan workers, whose company […]