Practice Project
Before going to Nicaragua in December, I decided to practice conducting ethnographical research in Hanover, New Hampshire. For my practice project, I interview with Yvette Zou. Yvette is a ’16 who just graduated and is now a first-year medical student at Geisel School of Medicine medical student. She participated in the CCESP trip as a member of the Community Health team back in December of 2014. Below is a summary of my interview with Yvette.
Me: What was your favorite part of the trip?
Yvette: I think my favorite part of the trip was getting to know the members of Bridges of Community and those doing on-the-ground work. They are there all the time. We cycle through but those superheroes are there year-round and greet every group of college students with the same enthusiasm! They are so patient with us. They have such a good sense of humor, fully intend to keep in touch with us! Like our whole team is still FB friends with people like Hugo and Roberto. They are a really special group of people!
Yvette continued and brought up the point about how even though some community members progressed in their professional careers, they chose to stay and further contribute to the local programs.
Like a lot of the time in other cultures and countries, you want your kids to move up in the world so that they don’t have to come back where you are due to the conditions you’re around. But what impresses me so much is that they did this IN ORDER to come back and help out their communities.
Me: That sounds so nice! Was there anything that you remember as your least favorite part?
Yvette: The plane ride to Managua to Siuna. It was a rocky plane…
The rest of the details may be NSFW but it was an interesting time to experience motion sickness.
Me: What made you want to go on the trip? What sparked that interest?
Yvette: I was starting to get interested in medicine around then. I was only pre-med since about two years ago. While on the other hand, a lot of my classmates were premed since they were five. Because I was starting to get interested in medicine and I knew I did not have that clinical experience because a lot of people that go into medicine…some have parents who physicians or they have family members who are physicians so they have had that exposure. I literally have none. No one in my family has done anything remotely related to medicine. I knew if I wanted to get…not hands on experience because we are grossly underqualified to do anything hands-on but more of “on the ground” experience that I would have to get some more exposure. Shadowing is good but kind of sporadic and short term. This seems more of like an immersion program, even though it was relatively short. I knew that even though it may be a really short exposure, it would be a very real exposure (by being immersed in 24/7 during the program). That was one reason I wanted to do it.
Another one was that being in Hanover at Dartmouth is a bubble (some people may disagree). But also just as being an undergrad where you don’t have the time or resources to go and explore other areas where there are problems like drug abuse in a lot of the areas of the Upper Valley. Poverty, drug abuse, homelessness… you know you don’t get to realistically be exposed to that as an undergrad, maybe in graduate school and medical school but I didn’t anticipate being able to get out of the bubble a lot during undergrad and I thought this was a really good way to get exposed to a different environment… and one in which healthcare really needs to improve.
Me: Once you finished this trip, did you realize even more that you wanted to go into medicine or be interested in a certain field even more?
Yvette: What it affected was not something necessarily specific but more of a sense that regardless of what specialty you go into, if any specialty at all, there are ways to part part of the system that contributes to improving to healthcare for underserved communities. Infectious disease. For example, that field gives you obvious reasons on how to do that. For instance, there are neglected tropical diseases that do not get funding because there’s no profit in it for the pharmaceutical companies and things like that. Global Health, Public Health, Infectious Disease those give you really obvious options. But for other fields, you can work with that same population in different ways like if you’re interested in pediatrics there are so many issues with raising children in a healthy manner in an environment that does not have the necessarily have the resources to provide that healthy lifestyle. At one point I was reflecting as an engineering major, when you think about a lot of these biotechnologies and how crazy expensive they are. You know, a part of engineering is making the next, more advanced, cooler machine that can image more deeply and getter a better resolution. But then there’s the other side of engineering that focuses on aspects like “How do we make things simpler? Cheaper?” It can focus on figuring out how to distribute these new technologies to people who need them that do not necessarily have access to electricity and running water. I think that my exposure to the kind of patient population and environment through the CCESP program showed me how that regardless of what you do, there are always ways to do what the members from Bridges to Community do and how they go back to the community that’s not so well served and figure out how to serve them better.
Me: How was your day to day life there? I’m curious about how your experience on the health team was like. I will be on the Community Health team too!
Yvette: The Community Health team was awesome! A lot of it will depend of your group, and thankfully I had a really good one. You know, in the class you get to know people fairly well, but when you are living in a room packed together with bunk beds… that’s when you really get to know someone well. Sometimes, some of my team members would get up fairly early which is fine because it didn’t feel unnatural since everyone does it! Some people got up early enough so that they could take a walk, go for a run before breakfast. And then you would go the clinic around 8 or so and first set up the clinic. Because the building had limited room, we set up sheets to divide the big room into sub-rooms so instead of seeing one patient at a team, we could 4 in that time frame. So we had to set that up every morning and take that down every evening. So while you are there, you could do one of several things: be the person that guides them through the clinic room, take notes while physician is speaking to them or the translator, and then guide them to the pharmacy.
Also, you could work in the pharmacy and help distribute the drugs, make sure it’s the right dose and everything. Most importantly, you go over the medication with the patient and clarify that he or she understands how to take it. Then, there are some people that would help handout eyeglasses and lead the tooth-brushing seminar. Those were some of the main roles and you would rotate between those reals. It’s nice because before the day starts, you would have a check-in session and then at the end of the day, there’s a reflection session where you would get to hear about how everybody else’s day was like.
Me: A concern of mine is feeling like I may end up being more of a burden than actually helping make a worthwhile difference. Did you ever have that kind of feeling?
Yvette: Yeah I think all of us definitely did but I think we have to keep in mind that your contribution might not be an immediate payback but in the long run, are you committed to helping underserved populations? Not even necessarily this particular population in Nicaragua. Are you committed eventually when you get further in life when you are actually in a position where you have the resources? The responsibility to affect real change? Are you going to affecting change in this area? I think that is that is how you can pay them back essentially for all of the work they are putting in to teaching you about their community and healthcare system so I think that’s how I tended to think about.
M: If you could go back on your trip, is there something you would have done, or not done, that would have have even made the experience even more enjoyable?
Yvette: I have such a good answer. You have to bring a headlamp! If you have to use the bathroom or find anything at night… it is pitch black! You don’t know where anything is! I didn’t bring a headlamp but had a tiny USB lamp that became my best friend!
CCESP Interview Practice Clip