Strength in numbers . . . and diversity
Here I am, sitting in a room with some really amazing people. They are all very different from each other. To my left is a man in his sixties with a distinct San Francisco accent, who is asking a whole lot of questions. Every time he does so, he clips his glasses over his nose, […]
The view
I sit at a desk in the Butaro Hospital pharmacy every day, facing a tall window that looks into the courtyard where patients gather and wait for their clinic visits. We sit facing one another, but it seems they usually don’t see me. The fountain ledge where they rest is about 30 feet away and […]
Saying Hello in Burundi
On my first day at ANSS in Bujumbura, I walked around with my co-fellow Pamela and one of our supervisors and met almost one hundred people that were to be my co-workers. Naturally, because there were tons of new names and faces and the introductions were entirely in French, I was unable to remember many […]
Encouraging change through collaboration
11 years of public health experience 8 languages 3 countries 2 U.S. states 1 goal of working towards health equity And this all fits in the less than 1000 square feet in New York City that we now call home! Even though my trip to the Big Apple was the shortest, I find myself living […]
Learning to Put the “Social” in “Social Media”
It seems a little like cheating to write my first blog post about, well, blogging. But I’ve been thinking back about a week-long period last month that revolved in one way or another around social media that it’s really the only thing I can think of to talk about. I’ve never been one to blog. […]
ICFP 2013 Reflections: Maternal & Child Health, Family Planning… and NTDs
As a current Global Health Corps (GHC) fellow, I was fortunate to attend the 2013 International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) last week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, jointly organized by the Ministry of Health of Ethiopia and the Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health. With a theme of “Full Access, Full Choice,” I was consistently inspired and challenged […]
Option B+ for every woman?
One of the projects that I work on at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation is a research study assessing the acceptability of option B+ among pregnant and lactating women in select sites in Malawi. In 2011, Malawi rolled out the Option B+ policy, which mandates health care workers (HCWs) to put every pregnant and […]
The gap between the ‘here’ and ‘there’
There is a phrase in Hebrew, my native tongue, which can be roughly translated as “What can be seen from here, cannot be seen from over there.” It can be used in many contexts but when it comes to my work in Burundi, I see it as pertaining to the dividing gap between the “office” […]
The circumcision solution: Is it a poisoned chalice?
I am a huge fan of debates and I have a cut-and-dry opinion on a whole gamut of issues. Aside from the fact that debates give me that sizzling rush of hormones in my blood, for the most part, they help me clarify my own values and worldview in a way that reading a book, […]
Elephants & Community
In the last two hours I have: seen one hippo lethargically dance across an arid riverbed, witnessed a large male baboon assert his dominance in a heated call to his tribe, protested a group of monkeys stealing both our food and anti-malarial medications (thankfully for both us and the monkeys we got the medications back), […]