The Pursuit of Hope in Global Health
By Esnatt Gondwe My brother in-law recently shared this quote with me: “Hope is not the conviction that something will end well, but that it makes sense, no matter how it ends.”– Vaclav Havel When I read this quote, it made me think about my fellowship year. Before starting the fellowship I didn’t know what […]
Telling Our Stories, Raising Our Voices
A man far wiser and braver than I once said: “there will be times when we will be powerless to prevent injustice but let never be a time when we fail to protest.” The reason I am busy doing something every day of my life is because it keeps me in balance. In everything we […]
Guest of Honor
At the age of fifteen I very much wanted to be an important person in the community. Think of those given front row seats labeled ‘reserved’ at functions, escorted to the front in case they took seats in the back, the ones who were given a microphone to speak last. And they seemed to have […]
The Role of the Community in Reducing Vulnerability Among Children
It has been six months now since I started my quality improvement work with URC USAID-ASSIST project Uganda. I joined the project in August 2013 as a Global Health Corps fellow working under the Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) program. The USAID –ASSIST OVC program aims to improve the quality of services offered to OVC […]
Does Aid Work? Is That the Right Question?
A group of young professionals working in the international development industry sat down to discuss questions that have been debated for years by academics and practitioners such as Jeffrey Sachs, Dambisa Moyo, and Bill Easterly. Have international development organizations been successful? Does foreign aid work? The young professionals launched into a lively debate, with some […]
Living Your Story
While reflecting on 2013 over the past couple weeks, I took some time to review my blog posts from my time last year as a GHC fellow in Rwanda. This is a post from about 8 months into my fellowship experience and right after my birthday (with some new alterations to post here). Looking at it […]
Havel Plays
Lest one brook misapprehension at nomothetic developments in Kampala, the government of Uganda must rightly attend to myriad problems that indeed do pose serious threat to the diverse and growing populace it represents. Despite the country’s well-publicized success in reducing HIV/AIDS prevalence since the 1980s, Uganda continues to suffer among the highest rates of this […]
13
It’s 2014….already? I can’t even begin to discern (says the good Jesuit in me) what 2013 was or the ways in which it changed me. But, here’s what I may have learned in 2013… 1. Kindness is the most important currency the world has to offer. As I have wandered into places far from my […]
Mental Health and Illness: At home and abroad
Nick Kristof really hit the nail on the head in his Sunday column in the New York Times “First Up, Mental Illness. Next Topic Is Up to You,” where he called out mental illness as one of the major issues systematically neglected to be given the seriousness and attention it deserves. Mental illness is still […]
A Deadly Dinner
Normally when people talk about global health and, more specifically, environmental health, they tend to focus on the big, flashy threats – floods, droughts, and toxic waste pollution, to name a few. But sometimes the most innocent and hidden/silent of activities can cause the greatest harm. For the greater part of my life, especially my […]