Preparing to Work in a Global Setting

During the fieldwork portion of the Global Health Minor, I traveled to Iringa, Tanzania where the group and I toured different NGO’s and healthcare facilities that work to increase health and community wellbeing throughout the region. There was a wide range of NGO’s that I was able to learn from, most of which focused on health initiatives concerning HIV/AIDS transmission, reproductive and women’s health, food insecurity, water sanitation, and even community building through microfinancing programs. I was also able to volunteer with The Olive Branch for Children in the Mbeya region. While there, I traveled out to the most rural villages I have ever witnessed and I gained a deeper sense of how location truly determines health outcomes. All of these wonderful visits were tied in with cultural activities, which included daily Swahili lessons, cooking classes, museum visits, and hikes to historical sites.

Living in Tanzania for five weeks helped me become more aware of how culture can affect health. Culture is a substantial factor when looking to change an individual behavior or public policy to improve health. While I was there, I sat down with a group of Tanzanian medical students to ask each other questions in regards to health procedures, health outcomes, and cultural views of health in the other’s respective country. From this conversation, I was able to help them understand our health care system while mutually learning about Tanzania’s.

I took extensive preparation courses throughout my junior year for the fieldwork portion of the Global Health Minor. I have also taken classes that have focused around health determinants especially in low-income settings. For example, when textbooks and papers I had read about rural health explained location as a determinant to health, I was unable to clearly visualize it in a global sense. After visiting the rural villages of Mbeya, I am now able to put what I saw into words and experiences in order to help broaden my academic peers’, friends’, and family’s understanding of global health challenges. In one of the villages in Mbeya, some women would have to walk up to eighteen kilometers while in labor to get to a district hospital. After driving along those eighteen kilometers of desolate roads, I have a new found understanding of barriers to health.

This entire experience proved to me how you can never truly prepare to work in a global setting until you are there. I had to adjust to every day being different than before and every opportunity affecting me in a different way than I thought it would. Because of this experience, I am more open to change. I am more open to what may lie ahead of me in my academic and professional career and because of this experience, I believe I am a more active global citizen. I have found a true passion for nutrition education after talking with doctors and witnessing the negative effects of poor nutrition has on the body. Now, I would like to look into continuing my education to help apply my global experience to help people in low-income households in the United States receive proper nutrition.