Breast Feeding: A Fundamental Human Right
A new law in the United Arab Emirates makes it compulsory for mothers to breastfeed their babies for two years. Under the legislation a wet nurse will be provided for any woman who is unable to breastfeed for health reasons. This sounds like gagging mothers to do their duty and responsibility, and it sounds controversial […]
Switching Lenses
I remember that day in Yale when all fellows that were to be based in Uganda working on health systems quality improvement held a discussion on how to go about their kind of work, what it takes, and how to support each other. What immediately came to my mind was the question of what kind […]
Getting to zero new HIV infections: Would mandatory testing get us there?
“A lion that kills, is one that does not roar”, goes a famous Savannah grassland African saying. “It is one that crouches and lays quietly in the calmly swaying savannah grasses, patiently crawling behind its unsuspecting victims”, goes the saying with further elucidation. The savannah grassland residents’ question then is, “what if we burnt down […]
Ten Years
Humor me for a moment… Let your mind wander back in time. Let it meander over your life’s trail to where you were 10 years ago. What was your focus then? How did you spend your time? What did you hope the future would bring? I was 15—a high school freshman in a suburb of […]
The long road to ending unsafe abortion
When we were 17, a friend of mine got pregnant. When she told me she planned to terminate the pregnancy, I was relieved. She was one of my smartest friends, but like all of my friends, she was so young to me. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like for her or the baby. […]
Refugee Women: The Champions of Community Health Promotion in Kyangwali Refugee Camp.
I have now completed six months holed up here in Kyangwali Refugee Camp doing primary health care activities at my placement organization, Action Africa Help International (AAHI). I came here in August 2013 as a Global Health Corps Fellow to serve as a Health Officer with AAHI under its refugee care program. AAH-I is an […]
And so it began…
It was the kind of warm, Rwandan morning that makes an expat forget they miss friends and family. Regina and I approached the gates of the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) stadium dressed to the nines and buzzed by the excitement of a large crowd waiting to enter the event. We were attending […]
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 […]
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 […]