For the next ~2 months, I’ll be stationed in the sprawling, byzantine complex that is the World Health Organization (in Geneva, Switzerland) as part of the Diagnostic Imaging and Medical Devices Team within the department of Essential Health Technologies. As an intern at the WHO, I hope to acquire a birds-eye view of how biomedical engineering interfaces with health policy, particularly with regards to the developing world. Afterward, I will join my fellow BTB interns in Blantyre, Malawi at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital to facilitate the implementation of global health technologies at the micro level. I thought it may be of some value to catalogue my experiences at the former, given that it may serve to inform the experience in Africa–namely, that the types of work in the two settings are deeply, inextricably interwoven.

There’s something intrinsically humbling about international travel.

I say this as someone to whom humility is no stranger. My recent arrival in Geneva was prefaced by the Truman Scholars Leadership Week (TSLW), during which I had the chance to meet my fellow class of 2012 Trumans–a humbling experience in its own right.

However, my stay in Switzerland, while yet nascent, offers a distinctly different strain of deflation than the one to which we are generally accustomed. Most of us find our egos perforated by way of juxtaposition–it’s difficult, for instance, to glance at a 10-page CV and not wonder whether the last Hot-Pockets-and-Halo marathon was worth its weight in either time or saturated fat.

While abroad, in contrast, it is anonymity that proves to be the ultimate leveler. Stripped of the convenient, easy identifiers of college affiliation (“Rice? Where is that exactly?”), language (“parle vouz ingles” has become the go-to phrase), and custom, I find myself left only with who I am at my most fundamental–the personality, skills and perspectives I most directly bring to the table, bereft of the frills that I take for granted on home turf. Granted, even in this vein, defining one’s niche is far from simple. My group of Medical Devices co-interns alone is comprised of a graduate student in biomedical engineering from Ghana, a journalist-turned-MBA from Canada, and an international relations postgraduate from Mexico–an unfairly talented, eclectic group. (I’d be jealous if they weren’t so painfully friendly.)

Yet it is precisely this inherent anonymity that I’ve found most enchanting about the WHO. Behind its drywall of multilingual bureaucracy, thousands of staff work in relative obscurity for the advancement of common welfare. Indeed, what’s immediately tangible is that there’s a cardinal impetus here–that, beneath the paperwork and protocol, amidst the trappings of international diplomacy, we are all fighting for the belief that health care is a public, global good. Work, here, appears to be embodied in the collective and emboldened by a tangible sense of, well, togetherness. (In short, it is the quintessential Ayn Rand nightmare.)

Of course, how this sentiment bears out in the long term remains to be seen; with work just beginning, stay tuned for many more thoughts and reflections to come.