The GHC Secret Family Recipe
Since I know you have been salivating in anticipation of enjoying your very own GHC experience, I have taken it upon myself to spill the beans about this famous, secret family recipe. For too long, the proud GHC family has developed young change makers in the global health field without revealing the special and loving […]
What Drives Me? My Family Curse
Kerala, India in the 1920s. My grandmother was giving birth in what I can only imagine was a hot and unventilated birthing room with low-skilled attendants performing her blood transfusion. That day doomed our family. Fast forward 65 years to the mid-1980s. My father, a pediatrician working in Saudi Arabia, was the youngest of seven […]
Promoting public health care equity and access
Public health care access and affordability is a civic right that every citizen is owed to enjoy unconditionally. However often social, economic, political and environmental barriers deter individuals from exercising this right. One billion people world over survive on less than $1.25 a day, making them unable to afford their health care needs and eventually […]
Sharing Your Narrative Out of Respect for Those You Serve
Zainab Salbi took the stage at Chelsea Piers in New York City with such poise and grace. With light streaming in the large windows, I sat with the rest of the 2014-2015 class of Global Health Corps fellows in awe – drawn to her experience as she spoke with honesty and humility. Her words had […]
Minding the Gap
As a child, I remember carrying around my favorite Disney characters’ story books, like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. I carried them not because I wanted to read, but to look at the pictures of the beautiful princesses in their pretty dresses and shoes. I am now an adult and I still find reading books a […]
Improving Patient Care, One Employee at a Time
Recently, my fellow GHC cohorts in Malawi launched the #health2me photo campaign to promote global health and GHC in Malawi, and to encourage people to think beyond traditional understandings of health. As I considered what health meant to me – well-being, happiness, self-sufficiency, peace of mind, and so on – I settled on the idea […]
Faith and family planning: conversations with faith leaders
Pastor Kainerugaba is a born again Christian. He lives in Naskasongola, Uganda, a district in the central part of the country. Pastor Kainerugaba is not just a pastor, however. He devotes much of his time away from his church to educating his community about the benefits of family planning. When a Marie Stopes International (MSI) […]
A Face in the Numbers
Numbers surround us and overwhelm us on a daily basis. From trying to calculate the exchange rate for finances to reviewing attendance numbers of outreaches and interventions, I often forget that each number has a person or commodity attached to it. Every participation sheet for an outreach represents real people and their stories. In my […]
What motivates me in my work as a GHC fellow with FVS-AMADE?
To many of my friends and family, it may have seemed like a strange decision for me to leave a decent paying job in NYC to work for an entire year as a Global Health Corps fellow in Burundi, a small, French-speaking country in East Africa where running water and electricity are a luxury. At […]
The Importance of Play
A couple months into my fellowship, I realized that I felt far away from the people that I’m here to serve. Working at an organization that doesn’t take part in direct service, it was difficult to feel like I was contributing to the issues I saw every day in Boston. Volunteering gave me a great […]