The end of my adventures (well, 2007's, anyway)

I'm sitting in the Delhi airport waiting for my flight to Taiwan. It hasn't really struck me that this adventure of almost two months is pretty much over. I am already itching for the next journey, not just the next public health adventure, but also my next trip to the motherland.

Completing my clinical hours for the MPH degree has opened up another world for me. When I was in class, I was always painfully aware that all that book learning gave me only a lopsided view of what it means to be a public health worker. Now I know better.

What does it entail, then? Well, during my clinical hours here in India, I saw that being a social worker/public health worker means being a teacher, a mother, a friend, a coach, and an entertainer. It requires you to sing songs to make friends with grubby kids. It requires you to teach the alphabet to and play Simon Says with middle-aged addicts. It requires you to stretch yourself so you inhabit a world that may be foreign to you, but that is everything to the people you are working with. That world is what they have; you must, in some way, own it too.

I keep telling myself that I don't need to travel halfway across the world to do this, to connect with people who need me, whose warmth and openness are probably a result of the simple, barebones lives they lead. There is plenty of field work right in my backyard, plenty of work for me to roll my sleeves up and get dirty for, which is what I like to do. I guess discovering this about myself reassures me that I've chosen the right career path for myself; being a public health worker (and I consider physicians to be public health workers, in some sense) is front line work.

Sometimes I wonder whether my experiences abroad (in Ecuador and India, to be specific) are really going to be useful to my future "target populations". I'm not sure if they will be. Could I see myself singing to addicts at a de-addiction center in the United States? Would they even respond to that? The American in me is dubious, but the human in me says why not? People are people, and perhaps there are some aspects of other cultures that could enhance my work at home in the U.S. Perhaps my parents' culture is protective against public health menaces (I think in some ways it is, but that's another post). But it's not just that. I hope to revisit the places I saw here in Bharat when I have more skills to offer. By God's grace, I've built a bridge now for myself, made contacts and put names, faces, and organizations on my internal map in a way that I'd never done before, not even in Ecuador.

Now if I could just learn Hindi!