My name is Stephanie Peace and I’m a fourth-year medical student at University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia, Missouri, USA. I’m at Kiwoko Hospital in Kiwoko, Uganda for the month of February doing an international medicine rotation through INMED.
A bit about me: I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and have long been interested in questions of poverty and global development. In college, I got involved with a non-profit organization called Project Peanut Butter that makes a peanut butter-based food for malnourished children. After working with them in Malawi, I volunteered to set up a new branch of the organization in Mali, where I moved after graduating college. A military coup rerouted my plans a bit, and I ended up spending some time setting up a new branch in Ghana and then running the branch in Sierra Leone before coming back to the U.S. to start medical school. I knew going into med school that I wanted to incorporate global health into my future career because my experiences with Project Peanut Butter had been so impactful. I also knew that any global health endeavor would have to be sustainable, evidence-based, and goal-directed.
Finding a way to incorporate global health into medical school can be challenging. For me, it included INMED’s global health course, an education-based trip to Nicaragua with my school’s global health organization, and now this international rotation. My primary objective for the rotation is to learn more about how medicine is practiced in low-resource areas, observe Ugandan and ex-pat medical staff in their roles at the hospital, practice serious discernment about what my own future global health career can look like, and serve (in whatever small way I can as a medical student) the people at Kiwoko Hospital.