Introductions...
Habari from Kisumu, Kenya. I'm a grad student at GWU in the MPH-GH, DME program spending my SSI with OLC Kenya. Translation for all you non-acronym types: George Washington University in the MPH-Global Health department, design/monitoring/evaluation track. This semester is our second semester intensive (SSI), Overseas Learning Collaboration (OLC) with Great Lakes University (GLUK) and the Tropical Institute for Community Health (TICH). And intensive, it is! One day of class in Kenya is equal to one week at home, squeezing a semester's worth of coursework into 2-3 week sessions-o-craziness. Add to that we're a group of 12 girls in one house, dealing with all manner of personal and familial challenges on top of the extreme stress of school, living in a bona fide developing country, and breaking the tip of the culture shock iceberg in time to re-experience it at home.
In our first session, we had Environmental/Occupational Health with a midterm after day 3 and a final on day 10. Quantitative Analysis consisted of learning a new software program (STATA) a midterm, final, and killer project: multivariate regression analysis defining relationships in the DHS survey for Bangladesh fertility rates. 3 weeks, done and done.
Our second session was a leap in the other direction: policy analysis. Not just your run-of-the-mill policy course but a 3 hour daily grind involving critical thinking and smart debate. After the three previous weeks of jam-packed fact memorization, and regurgitating them in exams, critical thinking was a challenge for everyone. Take the facts presented in the case and dig deep. Deeper. And render explicit the problem, it's causes, the solution, and its impact. By day 8 (equal to week 8 at home) we came up against the toughest subject yet: ethics. I'll get into it in a separate post, but the question by the end of three hours was this: Is it ethical for us to be here? For us to just be here, living, and going to school?
Everyone's been asking what I'm doing here and that's just it, I'm living here and going to school. I'm also seeing, doing, experiencing, adventure-ing as much as I can. I've learned more about myself, by being pushed into 'checking myself' on a daily basis, more than in the past 27 years (save for a few near-death experiences my mom would rather not relive). And in this short time I've come to the conclusion that to be successful in the future, to truly live with purpose and contribute and do something meaningful, I have to commit myself to continuous 'checking in.' In the last few months here I'll finally catch up on some of the things we're doing and attempt to translate what's going through my head along the way.
I hope that by sharing these thoughts, along with news and pictures and on-goings, I'll provide some food-for-thought along with the usual entertainment. If you know me, which you probably do if you're reading this little blog, I've already gotten in and out of a few sticky situations, broken some rules, dabbled with an international romance (or two) and busted a knee for the SECOND time in Africa :) Life's not easy here, it could be harder, but it's not easy and it leads to opportunities for reflection not easily enjoyed (or appreciated) back at home.
