April_eMagazine Volume 40

More documents

Recommendations

Info

OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION Global Health eMagazine April 2022 Watch this video!! Bani Adam by Saadi Shirazi “Decolonizing Global Health: The Path from Overshadowing to Illuminating” Mitra Sadigh Watch the video here >> Highlights Perspectives Behind the Scenes Announcements Decolonization of Global Health The Winning Essay at CUGH “A Radical Act” Written by Mitra Sadigh Spotlight Reflections Nursing Division SARS COV-2 Pandemic and Us Clinical Case Report A New Column Global Health and the Arts Articles of the Month Videos of the Month Calendar Resources It was June 2020. Six months into a global pandemic. Just weeks following the murder of George Floyd. The height of the Black Lives Matter protests. Our Global Health Program was finding a new home in the virtual sphere. I had claimed two sessions of our two-week elective to discuss cultural relativity and humility. The course was carefully crafted in an attempt to recreate the global health environment; that moment when a person, through interacting with a different culture and way of life, excavates their own privileges and beliefs and perhaps for the first time, questions them. Our nation was tearing at seams that have always existed but have never appropriately been acknowledged. That Friday morning, a student opened our class discussion with a few questions I could not have prepared myself for. Did Christopher Columbus arrive in the New World in peace, but couldn’t communicate his intentions because of the language barrier? Were slaves in the United States unable to own land because they weren’t educated in how to own land? Did slaves not know they were being oppressed because they weren’t educated? The virtual room fell silent. I had never heard anyone ask these kinds of questions. I was not aware that anyone had these kinds of questions. I responded the best I could in the moment. No, the issue with Christopher Columbus was not the language barrier. Peace is offered through actions, not words. Slaves couldn’t own land because they were oppressed. 8 Perspectives continued on next page >>
OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION Global Health eMagazine April 2022 Watch this video!! Bani Adam by Saadi Shirazi No, a person does not require an education to know that they are being oppressed. Every human being knows when they are subjected to injustice. A few students chimed in—to help me, to help this questioning student, to help their own sense of helplessness. To help our colleagues of color in the virtual room. The session left me reeling. At first I blamed myself for being unprepared—I should have known that our national reckoning would seep through the screen. Later, I blamed our education system for allowing a student to make it so far without a basic understanding of history. I then blamed our medical education system for allowing a student to enter clinical care without understanding this continuing history that impacts countless peers, colleagues, and patients. The thought evolved over the weeks to follow. I harnessed the only thing in this cascade that I could control: ensuring students completed our global health elective having been exposed to this understanding. The next cycle, I taught a new course: Colonization and Global Health—a delving into the ways colonization has and continues to create inequity, and the pervasiveness of the colonial mindset in today’s global health sphere. As it turns out, this is not an easy thing to teach. One student’s takeaway was that colonization was not as successful elsewhere as it was in the United States. Despite grave human rights violations, it was worth it because the nation is one of the world’s greatest superpowers today. Other students have begun the course perplexed by the connection between colonization and global health, and completed it with the two concepts only slightly more reciprocal. Highlights Perspectives Behind the Scenes Announcements Spotlight Reflections Nursing Division SARS COV-2 Pandemic and Us Clinical Case Report A New Column Global Health and the Arts Articles of the Month Videos of the Month Calendar But the overall response has moved me. Many students feel catharsis in sharing their personal experiences with colonization. Relief in connecting with others in shared perspectives. Elucidation in naming the traumas that affect them every day more clearly than before. Awe as they start to observe their world through a new lens. Shock, even indignation for the false narratives they had been taught previously—from the media, from teachers, from textbooks, from culture. Guilt and shame in the reality they didn’t see before. One student applauded my efforts in “sharing truths that were direct and arguably radical.” I am still sitting with the question of why speaking the truth is a radical act. Do people in low-to-middle income countries (LMICs) not know they are getting the short end of the economic, resource, and life expectancy stick because they are not educated? Do people in LMIC have lesser access to resources because they’re “not educated” in how to use those resources? Do people from high-income countries (HICs) come to LMICs with well-intentioned solutions, but are misunderstood as having a colonially-rooted savior complex? Global health experiences on-the-ground are capable of overturning these same fallacies, but with greater harm to host communities. It is the learning of a student from a HIC at the expense of a person in a LMIC, much like the students of color that day who were teaching the white student about the awareness that intrinsically arises within the oppressed. We cannot provide the breadth and depth of a global health experience in the virtual sphere any more than we can craft the nuanced, personalized lessons that a student on a global health elective would be faced with. But we can provide them with a platform on which to question how inequality came to be before they rush in to help fight it. We can encourage them to investigate the ways harmful legacies continue to propagate through our subconscious and the systems from which many of us benefit. We can awaken them to the abuse and mistrust from which global health emerged and currently inhabits so that they may someday truly connect with the populations they feel compelled to serve. “A Radical Act” Mitra Sadigh Resources 9 Perspectives continued on next page >>
Page 1 and 2: April 2022 Volume 40 NUVANCE HEALTH
Page 3 and 4: OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION Global Heal
Page 7: OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION Global Heal
Page 23 and 24: OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION Women’s H
Page 25 and 26: OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION CLINICAL CA
Page 29 and 30: OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION ARTICLE OF
Page 31 and 32: OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION GLOBAL HEAL

April_eMagazine Volume 40

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?