My First 90 days in the USA: Acclimating to an American life
I remember it like it was yesterday, June 27, 2014 – my friends and family, in mass, showed up at Bujumbura International Airport to kiss me goodbye. I was going to the United States – “The Promised Land”, as most of my friends would call it – to serve as a Global Health Corps (GHC) […]
Place Matters: The Role of Community in Health Outcomes
What runs through your mind as you sit in your doctor’s office, waiting to be called? You’re likely wondering about the long wait or hoping to get to the bottom of the aches and pains you’ve been having all week. Or maybe you’re worried about your last visit’s test results. Either way, your zip code […]
Why I Fell In Love With Research
I must admit, I was not always a fan of research. At some point, I actually bought into the myth that it was one of the most boring aspects of science. Today I am glad to say that that is no longer my view. From my own research as a public health student as well […]
Monitoring Media: Critical Ebola Questions We’re Not Asking
Over the past few months, I have been closely monitoring international media coverage surrounding the unfolding Ebola epidemic in West Africa as part of my role as the Communications Fellow at IntraHealth International. Somewhere in-between scattered piles of newspaper clippings, blaring audio reports, and confusing proxy manipulations to get by New York Times’ free trial […]
Global Health Work in Africa: a Passion or a Calling?
Development work in Africa for many is a calling to help people met by a commitment to provide solutions for poverty-related issues. For some, their work in Africa is in response to a call or request to provide special expertise in an area of desperate need. For me, it was a glorious fight for a […]
The Dancing Cog
I think of myself as a small cog in the machine in the world of global health. But sometimes, especially when the complacency of being but a speck in the ocean settles in, the dire need of the work you do hits you and you are overwhelmed by how little, yet how much you can […]
Willie Williams and The Path Out of Poverty
I had just attended my organization’s annual ‘day of service’, one day during the year when everyone from the Single Stop USA New York office volunteers at a partner site to offer their time and service in whichever way is most productive. I was placed in a food pantry about 10 blocks from where I […]
Building community: One Air Mattress at a Time
In our orientation training for Global Health Corps, many speakers presented us with analogies or metaphors for how to view the fellowship year. For some, it was a ladder: a series of rungs to climb up, each step taking you further than the one before it. For others, it was a web: a constantly-expanding network […]
Ebola and Fear
On the way back home from the GHC quarterly retreat in Virginia, a stranger on the subway tried to strike a conversation with the Boston fellows. He was curious about where we were from, what we did, etc. When he learned that we work with organizations at the frontlines of Global/Public Health, he immediately commented […]
Chikungunya: An Emerging Disease in The Americas
Given the major Ebola outbreak in West Africa, some governments throughout the world seem to be teetering on hysteria. In some cities of the United States, for example, schools have put teachers on leave and barred children from West Africa to enroll unless they show a health certificate, and parents have pulled their children from […]