Global Health Experience in Peru

Dear Members of the Class of 1957,

Hóla from Lima, Peru! I am currently working with Socios en Salud (the Lima branch of Partners in Health) on their Mental Health project. I am very grateful to have this opportunity. After reading Tracy Kidder’s biography of Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, I was inspired to study and work in global health and if possible, to work specifically with Partners in Health. I happened upon this opportunity after writing a research paper for one of my professors on maternal health in Peru. Recognizing my interest, she gave the contact information of one of her students who was working for a year with Socios en Salud as a Lombard fellow, a dream that is now taking root in my mind as well. I reached out to her and she helped me get in touch with the volunteer director here. After an extensive application and Skype interview, here I am. I am thankful everyday for the good fortune, or perhaps fate, that brought me here and allowed this opportunity to come my way.

This is my third full week of work and I am already much busier than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised by all that I will be able to help with in my time here – it consists of a wide variety of activities, but the I appreciate being able to work on different projects on different days. One of my main projects is working on the implementation of “Pensamientos Saludables,” or “Healthy Thinking”. It’s a new program created by the World Health Organization to combat perinatal and postpartum depression among women. I have a strong interest in maternal health, so I am grateful to be working on a project that is so personally meaningful and interesting to me.

One day of the week, I travel with another volunteer to the Ministry of Health where we are working to help compile, consolidate and organize the country’s mental health data. It has been ranked among the least organized systems in all of South America. We have certainly experienced a fair share of frustrations in getting access to data, but that challenge has become a part of the process that I recognize as making it so valuable and important. I have also begun teaching English along with another volunteer. On Mondays, we teach two classes of children, a younger age group and an older age group, and on Friday mornings we teach the other Socios employees at our office in Carabayllo. Along the way, I also work on random projects and tasks that the mental health team needs, whether it’s translating a grant, reformatting manual manuscripts for community health workers, creating posters, or helping with Excel.

When I embarked on this experience, my interests lay in the intersection between poverty and health and what changes can be made on a systems level to improve the delivery of healthcare. I view illness as one of the many barriers that can hold a person back from finding meaning in their life and being able to ask the bigger questions that are an essential part of being human: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What kind of life do I want to lead? Going hand in hand with health is poverty, so I am grateful to have been placed in an area where that intersection and my specific interests lie. I am stationed and living in Carabayllo, one of the poorest of Lima’s forty-three districts. It is quite a shock compared to Hanover. There was definitely an adjustment period as my body grew used to the pathogens in the drinking water and my mind overcame my initial shock at the living conditions of most of Carabayllo’s population. Really interacting with my neighbors though and the other members of my community has been one of my favorite parts of my brief time here thus far. It has made my work all the more meaningful because I can see, even in small ways, the lives that I am working to make better.

My deepest thanks to all of you for helping to me follow this passion.

Truly yours,

Kennedy

Playing with some of my
students before I start English class.
Behind the SES logo is an image of Carabayllo, the district of Lima where I am living and working.

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