April_eMagazine Volume 40

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
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Perspectives continued on next page >>