University of North Carolina Center for Global Initiatives

As a social work and maternal and child health student, my interests revolve around promoting health and social justice for women and children. This past summer, I was fortunate enough to conduct my master’s practicum with FHI 360 in Tanzania on a youth HIV prevention project called UJANA. As part of their Monitoring and Evaluation unit, I got a chance to apply the skills I had learned in numerous classes by working on qualitative interviews for their final performance report. Over 15 weeks, I learned all I could about the massive six-year program, reviewed reports, interviewed country staff, visited local partners, and interviewed local government and community members about the key successes and lessons from UJANA. I then wrote pieces based on my visits and interviews to include in the end-of-project final performance report, assisted in routine monitoring, and created a project timeline. The work I did helped me build skills in the field, but, more importantly, it helped me build confidence working in a complex system. I learned to work with various teams and management structures, practiced communication across cultures and public-private partnerships, and made tough decisions because of the high level of independence granted me for my project.

The experience was very valuable in that it exposed me to public health jobs and the role of foreign professionals in Tanzania; allowed me to network internationally; and allowed me to witness the complex donor-agency-partner-local government relationship. Although it was not my first experience living or working in a nongovernmental organization or in a low-income country, I was reminded of the need to be flexible and open-minded, especially about time, expectations, and promises. For example, many of my coworkers wanted to be polite and would promise to do certain things even if they knew they could not carry them through. By building in flexibility and back up plans to my agenda, I was able to readjust and still accomplish my goals. The experience further reinforced the lesson of getting to know my coworkers as a part of living and working in Tanzania. The lunch conversations and weekend outings taught me so much more about the organization’s work and development and public health work in general than anything I learned in the office. These friendships improved professional connections rather than hindered them.

Finally, I learned to be reflective and always careful when speaking with coworkers, partners, and communities alike. Oftentimes, I was seen as being in a higher position (despite the fact that I was only a young intern) simply because I represented FHI 360 or because I am American. I was sometimes asked to speak for all Americans on certain topics, to guarantee help in securing further funding, and to advocate for certain changes in the U.S.’s relationship with Tanzania. Here, I felt a dilemma because I had such limited power and did not want to make any promises, but did have more access to resources and influence than they did; I also worried that I would be perceived as rude or cold for not reassuring them since I had learned by then that promising to help was a polite thing to do even if you could not. In the end, I did not make any promises, but did encourage them by pointing out all that they have accomplished and will be able to accomplish simply because of their own skills and dedication. It was certainly a lesson in humility for me.

Khanh H Nguyen

Khanh H Nguyen is a graduate student in Maternal and Child Health at the Gillings School of Public Health. She received an International Internship Award to support her work. Check out the Awards page of our site to learn more.

With the help of a C.V. Starr Scholarship, I was able to do fieldwork in Port-au-Prince for a month in May 2012. Living with a Haitian family, I started to inquire about the daily life of an historic neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in order to track the popular responses to the 2010 earthquake. The following text is a report on my findings in this area of Port-au-Prince. Without the C.V. Starr Scholarship, I would not have been able to engage in an in-depth pilot project, which, ultimately, will serve as the basis of my PhD. Dissertation in Anthropology. CGI provides outstanding opportunities to UNC students who are eager to learn abroad!

“Pacot is a quiet residential neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Here, thick concrete walls, sometimes colorfully painted, sometimes topped with forbidding barbed wire, surround houses of a wide array of styles. Down these tunnel-like streets of these intermittently low and high enclosures, between the breadfruit and mango trees, the sunlight pours down on pedestrians, merchants, shoe shiners, SUVs and shabby taxis.  It is the end of May in Port-au-Prince. On this early morning, a man totes fluffy cotton mops to their destinations, a line of teenage students dressed in their impeccable uniforms hurry over the shattered sidewalk, an elderly lady meticulously picks over avocados from the dark green pyramid of granular fruit, where, in the shade, the vendor reads a dog-eared religious pamphlet. Walking in these picturesque streets offers a respite from the tumult of the overwhelmingly jammed, dusty arteries of ruined concrete buildings that usually appear on foreign TV screens when Haiti is mentioned. With the ornamented yet rusty summits of the old houses looking down on these slow-paced vignettes of daily life, Pacot contains clues to what a peaceful street-life and successful (re)construction of Port-au-Prince could be.

Most obviously, the numerous old houses of the neighborhood, that resisted the earthquake of January 2010, should trigger the interest of any agent involved in habitat building in Port-au-Prince. They range from small wooden structures comprising two or three bedrooms to polychromatic and richly ornamented two-story mansions. Built at the turn of the nineteenth century, both the extravagant homes and the humble light wood-frame constructions offer blueprints for paraseismic structures adapted to tropical weather. With their high ceilings and many shuttered windows, they enable air to circulate; with their roofed galleries they protect their residents against the glaring sunlight and heavy rain; their elevated floors diminish flood dangers and, finally, their timber frames allows for some flexibility in case of quakes. Moreover, in a city where anonymous concrete structures make up most of the landscape, these unusual dwellings, strongly rooted in Haitian cultural history, stand as some of the last monumental landmarks of the capital.

These vast and elaborate residences reminiscent of the Victorian Painted Ladies were named Gingerbread Houses by American tourists visiting Haiti in the fifties. Far from being pale copies of their American cousins, they were designed by Haitian architects trained in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Baussan, Mathon or Maximilien, in fact, borrowed features from the French seaside architectural style and from the American Queen Anne style architecture to build houses suitable to the tropical setting. The Gingerbread Houses are distinctively Haitian by the mere fact that a confluence of international cultural traits was channeled through a distinctive Haitian vision materialized, for instance, in the inventive ornamentation handcrafted by local master carpenters. Owned by the Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie at the beginning of the twentieth century, these houses are now occupied by people whose origins lie in every segment of the  Haitian social spectrum. In the same neighborhood, the passerby can catch sight of luxurious mansions inhabited by prominent members of the political elite, as well as lopsided houses squatted by several families. Usually, however, these houses belong to the vanishing middle-classes who are struggling to keep their historical homes in good shape. Joseph Bonnard, a former bank clerk who inherited a derelict crimson and gold wooden mansion, explains that his meager income does not allow him to take care of his house and to repair the structural damages the disaster caused. “Right after the quake,” Bonnard remembers bitterly, “almost no help reached the neighborhood. People were directed towards camps, even when they had a place to stay. Instead of building plastic houses with no windows, it would be wiser to help folks repair their own places. But it’s not happening.” Bonnard’s words would become a refrain as I  encountered more and more people in the same situation.

Amid the apparent torpor, the Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty (Fokal), stands as a beacon of hope as its project for the restoration of the Gingerbread Houses slowly progresses. Farah Hyppolite, a Haitian architect in charge of the project, presents a potentially fruitful approach to dealing with the reconstruction of her native city. By pointing out that the old houses of Port-au-Prince reflect a viable type of architectural design and house-building knowledge, she places the Haitian workers and their traditional skills at the heart of the reconstruction process. Fokal is now training a new generation of builders in order to restore the Gingerbread neighborhoods, and, possibly, to build a form of solid habitat that is culturally sound. Hyppolite would like the rehabilitation process to go faster and to see the Haitian state taking the lead in the conservation and restoration of its public and private patrimony. As we walked down Rue “O”, a narrow alley perpendicular to the central and busy Bois-Verna artery, she showed me parcels of land where no less than five small Gingerbread Houses had been bulldozed in a matter of two months. “The land is worth more than the houses themselves. There is tremendous financial pressure to get rid of the Gingerbreads. In these times when we have lost so many of our landmarks, the state should offer a legal framework to protect our cultural artifacts and help proprietors keep their historic homes alive.” Since 2010, more than twenty historical houses have been destroyed; the need to protect them is urgent.

Rehabilitating the Gingerbread neighborhoods, such as Pacot, and enabling residents to repair their homes are not only cultural emergencies but also ways to consolidate areas of the capital where different strata of the Haitian social landscape coexist peacefully on streets that are pleasant to walk and congregate on. However, such a vision demands strong governmental action: a politics of decentralization based on the revival of rural regions and other cities could open up the capital and alleviate the demographic pressure that weighs on it. Secondly, consolidating institutions dealing with cultural heritage, such as the Haitian Institute for the Preservation of the National Heritage, and giving them adequate legal and financial means would certainly clarify the direction efficient city planning should take. Finally, engaging the numerous foreign actors, so conspicuously absent from the streets of Port-au-Prince, in a constant dialogue with the whole of the population they are trying to help could only be beneficial. In this way, misguided construction projects with misconceived building designs could hopefully be abandoned for projects that place Haitians and their cultural and ecological needs at the center of the overall effort.  Amid the chaos of the shattered stone of this urban capital lies a rich historical heritage. By drawing on its past and on the skills of its inhabitants, Port-au-Prince could emerge again as a functioning city, just as it was when the Gingerbreads were erected at the end of the nineteenth century.”

Vincent Joos

Vincent Joos is a Ph.D. student in anthropology. He received a C.V. STARR Scholarship for an ethnographic study of Haiti's sustainable forms of architecture: the Gingerbread Houses Project. Check out the Awards page of our site to learn more.

This summer I had one of those rare experiences where the various interests in my life converged on one project.  For the last four years in North Carolina, I have worked in service-learning offices coordinating and supporting students who want to work in communities.  Currently, I am also working on a Masters in Health Behavior in the Gillings School of Global Public Health.  Supporting volunteers and working to improve people’s health at a population level had always been separate interests of mine until this summer when I learned about the powerful potential of volunteers to improve the health of the communities that they are a part of. 

With the support of CGI I was able to spend the summer in Thailand, where I did qualitative research with the Village Health Volunteers, the national community health workers of Thailand.

In Thailand there are almost a million Village Health Volunteers, or about one for every fifteen households.  The Village Health Volunteers provide basic clinical services, such as checking weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar to screen for diabetes.  They provide health education on diet, exercise, maternal and child health, and many other topics.  They help prevent infectious disease through providing resources and education to improve health outcomes, such as techniques to limit mosquito reproduction to decrease the incidence of Dengue Fever.  Despite the impressiveness of everything that the Village Health Volunteers do, what they do is not as impressive to me as how they do it. 

The Village Health Volunteers create change through long-term relationships and connections with the people they are serving.  They are neighbors and friends with the people they are responsible for.  They are able to offer advice and support that is tailored and individualized based on their knowledge of the community and relationships that have been built year after year.   An example of this is that when a Village Health Volunteer notices that you have abnormal symptoms and refers you to go see the doctor, they do not just stop with a verbal recommendation. If you forget about the appointment, they will remind you, if you need a ride they will take you, and in one instance that I observed this summer, if you are being stubborn and insisting that you do not need a doctor despite mounting evidence that something is wrong, they will go get a doctor and bring the doctor to you. 

I feel that I learned so much from being able to study the activities that the Village Health Volunteers perform and how the they accomplish their work.  As a person deeply interested in both supporting volunteers and improving health, the long-term relationships that the Village Health Volunteer program encourages and supports is a model that I think is applicable to many other health outcomes and community contexts.  This summer was an incredible experience and also provided me a direction of research and practice that I hope to continue to pursue in the future. 

Dane Emmerling

Dane Emmerling is a Masters student studying health behavior and health education in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. He received a CGI International Internship Award to investigate the effectiveness of Thailand's peer support interventions. Check out the Awards page of our site to learn more.

With the support of CGI through the Carolina Undergraduate Health Fellowship, I was able to travel to Ghana as a trip group leader with Project HEAL, a committee of the UNC Campus Y. I travelled in Ghana with a group of five other wonderful UNC students.

We began our journey in Accra but after just a few days in the capital and another large city, Kumasi, we travelled by bus to a small rural town called Lawra in the Upper West Region. Project HEAL has been returning to this same area for the last six years and has thus built relationships with the leaders, teachers, and people of Lawra. Without their collaboration and support, we would not have been able to implement our public health and educational projects.

First, we were able to complete and plan several sustainable development projects. Through the use of drip irrigation systems, we were able to help create a Moringa tree nursery with MOFA (Ministry of Food and Agriculture) and a local Peace Corps Volunteer. The nursery is located at the old MOFA fisheries site in Lawra and the goal is to restore it as a showcase for alternative livelihood projects. Furthermore, we have made plans to complete rainwater collection systems next summer at several potential locations. We met and spoke to administrative staff at the Lawra district hospital to hopefully install a rainwater collection system next year at a community health clinic. We also made contacts with several women from a small village named Tabier, where we could potentially install a rainwater collection system as well.

For health projects, every year Project HEAL performs first aid and dental workshops and distributes kits at various schools in the region. This year, we performed first aid and dental workshops at four primary schools and a women’s community group, totaling about 1000 individuals. We conducted presentations with the teachers of the schools to ensure that our workshops are culturally relevant. In many of the younger classes, the teachers translated our presentations in the local language of Dagaare. Additionally, we donated much needed medical supplies to the Lawra district hospital. Some people in our group were able to shadow doctors in the pediatric ward of the hospital.

Lastly, we completed educational projects. At the Eremon senior high school, where another local Peace Corps Volunteer teaches, we painted a world map mural on the side of the dining hall that includes all of the labeled countries. When we asked high school students to point to Ghana, they simply did not know and some did not know which continent was Africa. In many public schools in Ghana, geography is not often taught in schools because of a lack of funding and supplies.

What excited me the most while we were in Ghana was the people. In the harshest environments, I met some of the happiest people. Many days, the highest temperature was definitely over 100 degrees. Thunderstorms brought relief but came with the tradeoff of no electricity throughout the town. When we went to the village of Tabier, we were able to briefly experience village life.  There, people have to work so hard for basic necessities like food and water much of the time without the conveniences of infrastructure such as improved sanitation, running water, and electricity. For a women’s group in the village, we performed a first aid and dental workshop. After our presentation, the women thanked us with the most jubilant and energetic songs and dance. I will remember the places I saw but more importantly the people I met for the rest of my life. 

Mimi Caddell

Mimi Caddell is an environmental studies major in the College of Arts and Sciences. She received a the Carolina Undergraduate Health Fellowship for sustainable water use development and Health Education Projects in Ghana. Check out the Awards page of our site to learn more.

Looking back now, I would say that returning to Tanzania gave me a chance to see the place for what it is, rather than with the wide eyes of a newcomer eager to compare everything to my expectations.  Ironically, I was greeted by a large family of monkeys who enjoyed playing tag on my tin roof most mornings (which is stereotypical, but far from typical).  Still, I had a chance to live a relatively normal life for seven weeks among dogs, cats, chickens, books, daladalas, rice and beans, a massive doctors’ strike, and a mountain that never ceases to amaze me.  I did say “relatively.”

I need to first be clear about one thing: my summer internship was an office job.  With that said, it wasn’t a typical office job as one would define it in the US.  My second work stint in Moshi led me back to the country with a new focus on the inevitable issue of HIV and AIDS. 

The immediate area doesn’t have the highest HIV prevalence (6%) or the most disadvantaged citizens (it’s a tourist town) in sub-Saharan Africa, but for decades it has proven to be an effective research hub for scholars of many nationalities.  The HIV/AIDS epidemic is also not as formidable as it used to be.  Testing, counseling, and treatment services are widely available, often for little to no cost, meaning the disease is no longer a death sentence for those who test positive.  One of the major remaining barriers, though, is the fact that many people simply do not know they are infected.  In the country as a whole, only one-third of Tanzanian adults have ever been tested for HIV in their lifetime.  This means that there are still countless (literally) individuals who are contagious and likely won’t discover their status (or their partner’s) until it is too late.

With all this in mind, I came into my summer internship to assist with a survey that’s using innovative methods to ask ordinary citizens what would compel them to get tested.  One of the bigger challenges to this project, as I would learn, was finding a way to reach a random sample of these “ordinary citizens.”  It would have been straightforward to deliver the survey to a captive audience of hospital patients or visitors to a women’s clinic, but we wanted a pure and unbiased representation of the town as a whole.  Why not use addresses or random phone dialing or census data?  Enter the developing country effect.  These typical sources for population-based sampling range from non-existent to unreliable in a setting like Tanzania. 

After a lot of back and forth, we finally decided to choose random points throughout town as starting points for household recruitment.  Most of my days were filled with the process of developing and carrying out a systematic way to do this using maps, GIS technology, spreadsheets, screenshots, file converters, and other fun tools.  This work represented just one of many steps in the process of executing the study, and the study will be just one of many to investigate HIV testing strategies in Africa.  This summer’s work not only gave me new knowledge and skills, but it also gave me perspective and hope.  I now have a much better understanding of the vast scope of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but I also have more hope that increased attention to health behavior will allow for further progress.  I really appreciate CGI and the International Internship for helping to provide an opportunity to do this work and think about how I want international research to play a role in my career.

Andrew Weinhold

Andrew Weinhold is a graduate student studying health behavior and health education in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. He received a CGI International Internship Award to develop a survey to inform HIV testing practices in Tanzania. Check out the Awards page of our site to learn more.

Cultures, traveling, and exploring have always been passions of mine. Maybe it was due to the fact that my extended family decided to take a vacation to Cancun, Mexico when I was only 6 years old. Or it could have been due to the influence of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. Yes, the Chipmunks, and their race around the world in hot air balloons in the epic adventure “The Chipmunk Adventure." Either way, I had a strong fascination with the worlds outside America. After graduating from the University of South Carolina with a degree in chemical engineering, I moved overseas, first to Egypt and then to Lebanon. I spent two years abroad learning Arabic and working with university students. During my time overseas, I began to see the physical needs surrounding me in the Middle East. I wondered how I could use my engineering background to serve the poor in the developing world.

            In the spring of 2010, I began searching for job positions that combined engineering and international development. As I read the descriptions, I realized that even with my Bachelor’s degree, I was lacking key skills. However, the search enabled me to determine what kind of a career I wanted and helped me identify graduate school as a means to gain the necessary experience. When I was looking at graduate programs, the Gillings School for Global Public Health stood out due to its diversity of departments.  The unique placement of the Environmental Engineering program within the School of Public Health was a major draw for me because it provided the opportunity to learn about the nexus of water systems and health. I had also read about the Water Institute through the school’s website and was excited to work with researchers from diverse backgrounds that were all studying various aspects of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH).

            When I interviewed with my advisor, Dr. Jamie Bartram, I emphasized how important fieldwork experience was to me. One of the skills I was seeking to gain through my graduate studies was the opportunity to experience WASH projects overseas firsthand.  Knowing this, Dr. Bartram was able to pair me with an internship with the University of Leeds to work on a collaborative project called “At Home Water Supplies” funded through the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The project was a joint cooperation led by the University of Leeds, and included the University of East Anglia and the University of North Carolina.

            The project itself focused around quantifying the health benefits of having water at home rather than using a shared public supply. One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to “halve, by 2012, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation” (United Nations, 2002). While the goal is a bold declaration, it lacks a definition of what “access” truly means. How much water should people have and how far away from one’s home? The DFID At Home Water Supplies study aims to further explore the relationship between distance to the water source and its impact on health. 

            As an intern for UL, my responsibilities ranged from stateside preparation of logistics to implementing the household survey data collection in Ghana over the summer.  One of my stateside responsibilities included writing an ethics application to submit to the UNC Institutional Review Board. I was also responsible for creating a projected fieldwork timeline, a budget and then purchasing the necessary supplies and equipment. Months before my departure, I had weekly skype calls with the team in the UK as well as our in country partners to plan out the necessary details of our research project.

            Before arriving in Ghana, my colleague, Dr. Mike Fisher, and I were able to spend a few days in Norwich with the rest of the research team. The time was invaluable for ensuring that we had a consistent understanding of our research instruments. Our study was to be carried out by the partnering universities in three separate countries. UNC would be responsible for data collection within Ghana while two other teams collected data in South Africa and Vietnam.

            On July 19th Dr. Fisher and I arrived in Accra, Ghana and were received by colleagues from our partnering institution, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Immediately after arriving, our host Mr. Leslie Danquah, a KNUST doctoral candidate, escorted us to Kumasi where we were based during our 8-week data collection campaign.

            The first week in Ghana we spent becoming familiar with the culture and setting up our fieldwork. We needed to recruit at least 12 research assistants in order to administer our survey to 250 households within the allotted 8 weeks. Mr. Danquah assisted us by identifying roughly 20 candidates for us to interview as potential assistants. After reviewing their skills in math, English, written and spoken Twi, we hired 16 to work on our project. Once we were confident with the 16 candidates, we began training them on our household questionnaire and the specific equipment they would be using.

            At the end of training, we spent five days piloting our survey in a nearby rural community. This also allowed our research assistants to practice interviewing real households and for us to catch any errors they were making in recording the responses. In addition, it gave Dr. Fisher and I the opportunity to iron out logistical speed bumps that came up. Upon completion of the pilot, we transitioned to the first of four communities where we would be conducting our research.

            Since we only had 8 weeks to gather our data, we needed to work six days a week, beginning at 8am and concluding our interviews at 4pm. At the of the day, the research assistants then gave us their completed surveys and water samples. However, our workdays were far from over though! Dr. Fisher and I then checked each survey for completeness and consistency. We then had to process the water samples collected that day and read the results of the samples from the day before. Once the surveys were checked, they then had to be scanned to ensure a backup copy existed of all data collected. While the pace was sometimes overwhelming, we were able to accomplish the majority of the fieldwork before I returned to North Carolina.

            One of my favorite experiences happened during the first week, when Dr. Fisher, Mr. Danquah and I were visiting the study communities. Mr. Danquah guided us to the local water points where we were able to informally ask questions of the children gathered around the borehole for their evening water fetching chore. Mr. Danquah graciously translated for me so that I could ask the girls about carrying water from the borehole back to their house. In Ghana, it is customary for women to carry items on their head. We watched the women and children fill up their containers, lift them onto their heads, and begin the journey home. Dr. Fisher then decided that he wanted to see how difficult it was to balance that much water on his head! So with the help of the women, children, and Mr. Danquah, both Dr. Fisher and I attempted to carry a container full of water on our heads! It is as hard as it looks, especially since the water shifts as you move! The children applauded us and laughed heartily at the strange “brunis” (white people) who had come to ask them questions about their water.

            While working in the field, I gained highly valuable skills that have dramatically influenced how I view my second year of graduate school. My courses were interesting during my first year, but since my return to the classroom I have noticed a heightened focus. There is more of a connection between what I am reading and learning to what I have experienced overseas. Through my internship in Ghana, I have also learned how to manage a field campaign in a foreign country. Although at times it seemed like trial by fire, I appreciated the opportunity to make decisions in the field and have the responsibility of problem solving. One of the biggest lessons I learned during my time in Ghana is that fieldwork is never as clean as the published papers make it out to be! Data collection is messy and when dealing with a foreign culture, there will always be unanticipated cultural differences between researchers and subjects!

Ashley Rhoderick

Ashley Rhoderick is a graduate student studying environmental sciences and engineering in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. She received a CGI International Internship Award to determine the benefits of at-house water supply in Ghana. Check out the Awards page of our site to learn more.

As a Master’s student in the School of Public Health at UNC, I am very interested in the intersection of global health and chronic disease management. This summer with the support of CGI, I was fortunate enough to combine both of these interests by conducting research in Thailand on the Village Health Volunteer (VHV) program. As a little bit of background, the VHV are lay health workers in Thailand, who provide support to fellow community members on a variety of different health outcomes, ranging from Dengue Fever to Diabetes. In doing so, they perform a variety of different activities, such as blood sugar screenings and surveillance of stagnant water that could breed mosquitos.

Along with another colleague from my Master’s program, I was given the opportunity to conduct qualitative research on the VHV program. Primarily, we were interesting in assessing how they offered support to individuals and what factors influenced this. However, what I learned transcended these initial research questions, both academically and personally.

In an academic sense, I vastly increased my knowledge, understanding, and ability to perform public health research. While I was taught the basics of research methodology in the classroom, the skills that I learned over the summer far exceeded what could be theoretically explained. I learned how to create an interview guide in an international setting, how to collect data by working with translators, and what it means to engage with communities. I also learned about real-world barriers and challenges to conducting research, especially research abroad. There were linguistic barriers (e.g. there is no Thai word for empowerment), cultural barriers (e.g. hierarchies that determined to whom we could direct questions), and logistical barriers (e.g. lack of time).

In developing my skill set and encountering these challenges, I learned one of the most valuable experiences of all—the value of support. In fact, throughout the research, my classmate and myself explored how the Village Health Volunteers offered support. This would often take different forms. Sometimes, the VHV would do home visits and ask simple questions, such as “how are you doing today” or “have you had any problems recently?” In other instances, the VHV would act as liaisons between patients and doctors, helping to translate concerns or suggestions. In other cases, they would perform blood pressure and blood sugar screenings and help patients understand what the results meant. Thus, we observed that the VHV were influential to the health of both individuals and communities and that the support they offered was influenced by a number of factors.

However, in addition to the support we researched in the community, I also came to personally appreciate the value of institutional and community support from my own experience. Logistically, there was financial and academic support from UNC, CGI, and Mahidol University (our partner organization in Thailand). More than that however, there was an incredible amount of support from the communities in which we worked and the people with which we interacted. I feel so fortunate to have made long lasting relationships with the doctoral students and faculty that assisted our research. Even in our limited site visits, I felt an incredible amount of support and respect from community members. In the United States, we often value the “I”; this summer in Thailand, I learned to appreciate the “collective we” and the value that this adds to both research and personal experiences.

All in all, this was an incredibly rewarding experience that taught me important lessons regarding qualitative research, international settings, and community engagement. In doing so, it has informed my own research methodology and given me a greater perspective for my future pursuits.

Sarah Kowitt

My trip to Central Asia was not something that I had planned for the summer 2011. In fact, it was a spontaneous endeavor that turned into a life changing experience and helped me to reconnect with my family roots. My interest in the region stemmed from my diverse background and my upbringing in Russia, and I developed a passion for initiating efforts to encourage education in post-Soviet nations. To me, education is an essential part of international development and means of increasing living standards and the general welfare of any country.

It all began with the decision to take advantage of my summer and satisfy my passion for volunteer work. I always enjoyed community service and while participating in several projects at a time throughout Chapel Hill and the surrounding areas, I wanted to satisfy my wanderlust as well. I underwent the regular process of applying for internships to various NGOs, but after several months of silence, I took the matter into my hands and contacted professors and staff at UNC to aid me in my search for a summer project. Luckily, I was able to contact the U.S. Embassy in Turkmenistan and after several persistent emails, I received a reply and was recommended to American Councils. This particular NGO is funded by the U.S. State Department and deals specifically with aiding students in their educational pursuits, and I would be personally overseeing the academic progress of students in the capital of Ashgabat. It was truly the funding from CGI that secured my summer internship with the NGO.  Without the scholarship, I would not have been able to discover my new-found passion for Central Asia.  I recall daydreaming about the scorching sands and, according to State Department’s website, the abundance of scorpions. Sights I wanted to see and new sensations I desired to experience were all made possible by CGI.

Was I scared? Deathly. This was the first time I traveled by myself and without knowing a single soul in this exotic country, my expectations reached zero. As I waited at the airport in Turkey, I began to notice women in strange garbs lining up by the gate labeled “Ashgabat, Turkmenistan”. What on earth made me decide to go there? I recall my first few days as a blur. It could have been the heat or the unceasing tears. I am not afraid to admit that I was very scared to be alone and without a decent Internet connection and no way to contact my parents or friends, I sought comfort in my new surroundings. Over the next few weeks and months, I learned the bus routes and the taxi system. I began to pick up words and customs, and the sights that I dreamed about at night finally began to blend with reality. The people were curious about this new comer who spoke their language and was their only link to America. My host mother had to adjust to my Western clothes and addiction to the Internet while I had to adjust to sitting on the floor for every meal and my new style of living. I traveled across town and taught English and college prep classes every day and over time, I learned. I began to understand my students and how much they longed to improve their education and better their chances in this life. Talking to them and truly appreciating our differences and similarities made this experience invaluable. I put aside my ambitions and dedicated my efforts to help them become more proficient in English and improve their skills in essay writing and critical thinking. As I taught these students what it means to be educated in the United States, I understood what it meant to me. As an immigrant from Russia, I was truly lucky to attend such a great university and I hope to dedicate my time and efforts after my graduation to NGOs such as the American Councils.

The country of Turkmenistan is mostly considered to be one of the “-stan”s and its distinctive customs and traditions are completely different from the surrounding post-Soviet states. Indeed, I did not teach my students in my classes as much as they were able to teach me outside of the office. Girls of sixteen or eighteen years of age took me under their wing and allowed me to truly experience the country and its customs. I spend every waking moment adapting and that is the only way one can truly appreciate the country and its unique qualities. I was able to attend a traditional Turkmen wedding, travel to rural villages, and visit historic and religious sites. I began to blend into their world by adopting even the Turkmen dresses and eating with my hands at every meal.  With that, I was able to truly understand what it meant to live 6,500 miles away from all the comforts of home.  Shed your old self. Lose the fear, because in a way, the people of Turkmenistan were not so different from me and as I retrace my steps back to a region that is so exotic and unknown, I began to understand that it is closer to me than I previously believed.

Karina Ibrahim was awarded a C.V. Starr Scholarship. Check out the Awards page of our site to learn more.