Students Share Experience, Perspective

Author: JUlie Samara

Last week's "Global Human Health: Perspectives and Possibilities" symposium offered Middlebury students a world of opportunities to learn about health care issues, particularly with respect to developing nations. On day five of the symposium, a panel of four Middlebury students shared their medical experiences abroad. Michael Azzara '02.5, a chief member of the symposium committee, called Friday's student panel "an integral part of the symposium" which was intended to generate answers to the question of what more students can do at Middlebury College to raise awareness of health issues while making steps towards improving human health worldwide.

The panelists, Peter Park '02, Emily Newick '01.5, Harvest Ficker '02 and Annie Lionberger '02.5, have all worked with patients and community members in foreign countries and spoke about their perspectives on health problems and how they are treated in different parts of the world. Park spent last Winter Term in Ethiopia conducting medical research and spending time with patients, many of whom were HIV-positive children living in an orphanage. Amazed by the relatively poor health conditions and the number of children living in the streets, Park said he "felt encouraged" to see the strong community and sense of hope offered by the "family structure" of the orphanage and care-centers in which he worked.

Newick's experience in public health comes from a series of visits to Honduras. Newick's talk focused on her last trip to El Rosario, where she worked with various programs learning and teaching about local health issues. Dentists and dental students offered teeth-brushing demonstrations to kids and parents, while Sustainable Harvest International helped start up family gardens in an effort to introduce new foods into the diet of El Rosario, an area plagued by drought and famine. Newick said that her time in El Rosario showed her all the "interconnected pieces of human health," demonstrating how public health depends upon issues ranging from water supply and diet to education and politics.

Last Winter Term, Ficker participated in Health Outreach in the Dominican Republic, a program providing primary healthcare in rural villages. Ficker worked as an interpreter for the program's group of about 50 people, including doctors and social workers. The organization's health outreach involved "distributing basic medicines, in our terms," and tracking the progress of the 100 patients who visited the program's site each day, Ficker said, describing her experience as "demanding but very rewarding."

On a visit to Mexico during her February semester before coming to Middlebury, Lionberger "fell in love with the city of Oaxaca," and returned the following summer to conduct a study among Oaxacan women on the use and knowledge of folic acid, with permission from the government. Folic acid is beneficial for women throughout their childbearing years, as folate is an essential nutrient in protecting against ovarian and uterine cancers and in reducing the chances of neural tube defects in newborns. A result of Lionberger's study was the discovery that amaranth, a grain indigenous to Oaxaca, provides a solution to the lack of folic acid in the Oaxacan diet and a way for women to act as "health promoters" in their communities. Containing folic acid as well as protein and fiber, amaranth grows well in Oaxacan soil and facilitates recipes for easy, inexpensive meals.

After the success of her work in Oaxaca, Lionberger co-founded "Bridge to Community Health," a non profit organization which aims to tackle broad social and health issues "at the root of the problem" by setting up feasible solutions through education and local programs, then leaving communities to continue these initiatives on their own. Lionberger is currently in the process of making "Bridge to Community Health" recognized by the U.S. government.

The student panelists agreed that they each felt inspired to return to the countries they volunteered in, encouraging Middlebury students to seek out funding and other opportunities for medical experience abroad through the college. As Lionberger commented in her presentation, volunteering in public health promotes effective healthcare "from the bottom up." In our search for answers to far-reaching questions of human health, the Global Human Health Symposium's student panel provided a sense of hope that we're moving in the right direction.