The past nine weeks have been one of the most important learning opportunities I have ever experienced. They have given me a chance to observe a developing setting and come to a more complete understanding of what it is like to deliver medical services to a low-resource area. In any field related to development it is absolutely essential to have a firsthand understanding of what needs you are trying to meet and what resources are available in that setting, and this trip to Malawi has given me some of that information.
As a student with limited technical experience, an internship at Queens is of course a great chance to learn, but that was not the primary goal of my summer. It was, more importantly, nine weeks during which I was able to search for pressing needs within the hospital and the CPAP office, and try to fix them. I brought with me some knowledge of biomedical engineering, some knowledge of underdeveloped settings, and a lot of passion about the work I was doing. Over the past two months I have occupied my time trying to put those resources to use.
The needs I tried to meet and the tasks I accomplished were not particularly revolutionary, glamorous or heroic. Sometimes it was data collection and reading patient records, sometimes it was bringing a broken device to the engineering office or a fixed device to the nurseries, and sometimes it was as small as putting new batteries in a pulse oximeter. While very few of my projects affected the lives of a patient in a direct or tangible way, they were nevertheless all set to accomplish something that needed to be done. Many of them in them ended up providing more than one group with something valuable. In the tech surveys, I helped Rice by giving them feedback for further design and development, and I helped the hospital by bringing them closer to access to new technology. When I helped to design posters that inform nurses and clinicians how to wean a patient off CPAP, I was helping those who weren’t familiar with how to wean learn, and I helped those who already knew by relieving them of the responsibility of overseeing those who didn’t.
When I got home, one of the first questions my family asked me is whether I would go back again next summer, or whether I would do it again if I had the chance to do this summer over. As a personal experience and chance to learn, my trip to Malawi is absolutely something I would repeat. As a chance to give something to a low-resource setting, I have no regrets. I only hope that the work I did was helpful to the CPAP team and to Queens, and that my education at Rice provides me with more skills and knowledge that I can use in similar experiences down the line. Because of my time in Malawi, I am even more prepared to continue my work and education in the global health field, so that I can hopefully serve the developing world in a way that does justice to the opportunities I have been given.