Arriving in Zambia
April 1st, 2018 by Daniel Boron-Brenner
Posted in Uncategorized|
The end of my journey to Zambia concludes a few hours from where I now sit, at a hostel in Livingstone, with a blue sky overhead (ceiling: unlimited), a pot of fresh coffee, and a gentle susurrus of voices from the church next door, extolling the virtues of Easter Sunday. I am fighting a little cold but, for the first time in days, I feel rested and whole. Before arriving here, on and off, I spent nearly 33 hours traveling to Zambia from Detroit, boarding two flights (seven and eleven hours a piece) as I flew across the world. Last night, a few hours after arriving in the country, I saw a rainbow crest Victoria Falls (a “moon bow” cobbled together from the piercing light of a full moon and the spray from the world’s largest waterfall) and today we will explore the rest of the city. Tomorrow, we leave for Macha Mission Hospital. I am curious about the facility where I will spend the next month of my life, and my last one as a medical student.
I’ve been reading “The World’s Emergency Room” by Michael VanRooyen, the chairman of emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a founder of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a program aimed at providing instruction in humanitarian aid and disaster response. Although Dr. VanRooyen’s experiences in disaster response are markedly different than the one I am currently traveling to, his descriptions about living and working in a country not your own rings true. He writes about his time overseas as an essentially dislocating experience, taking him from the comfortable perch of an American-trained physician and revealing what he does, and does not know, about the world around him. His secret to navigating this terrain lies in a potent mixture of pragmatism and flexibility. Although unwilling to compromise the core humanism that drives him to work around the world, he understand that sometimes things are more complex than they appear and that perspective can readily transform into bias. Keeping one shared goal in mind–to help people and to learn from them–Dr. VanRooyen was able to transform an early impulse to travel the world as a medical student into a thriving humanistic career.
As we journey towards Macha, I am striving to keep Dr. VanRooyen’s example in mind. The hospital is, by all accounts, significantly less resourced than the facilities I am used to in the US. As a result, the emphasis will be less on the utilization of technology and much more on the use of my clinical and diagnostic skills. It is, in a sense, my first brush with “pure” medicine. It is also my first experience working overseas and I don’t quite know what to expect. Nonetheless, I am eager to see what the hospital holds for me. After all, the journey to become a physician has already taken me so far, both in time and in space, that what’s a few thousand more miles to add to the trip?
Hello! My name is Daniel Boron-Brenner. I am a medical student at AT Still University, and I’m