A Note From Katrina

During Winter quarter of my junior year of college, I got the incredible opportunity to work with GHEI on the Sorano Malaria project. For twelve weeks the Sorano community health care workers and I conducted WHO surveys that evaluated the effectiveness of a bed net intervention one year later. Every day was a learning experience as I developed insights into Ghanaian culture and learned how this influences behaviors that affect health. A year and a half later, my friends still joke that any experience I have I can relate back to “this one time in Ghana...” After working on a project where I felt my time and efforts directly correlated with change, it was difficult returning to a classroom to simply learn about global problems rather build a tool set to help address these. To fuel my desire to make concrete changes I gave up the 20+ hours a week I was devoting to varsity swimming, took an internship at Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding, and became the Community Development Officer for a two week winter break trip to Nicaragua.

From my experiences working with the CHWs in Sorano and from exposure to Rotary International’s passing Polio eradication campaign, I became intrigued by monitoring and evaluation of global health initiatives. After experiencing the cultural biases and miscommunication that can occur when conducting “Western” surveys in a “non-Western” culture, I was curious how these miscommunications could be prevented and also curious how large scale initiatives could gain the trust of participants living in rural communities. Next year I will be doing a post-bachelor fellowship with the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation where I will have the opportunity to work alongside some of the top researchers in the field of global health, build skills in quantitative and qualitative analysis, and jointly pursue a MPH from the University of Washington. My experiences in Sorano cemented my interest in global health and have since opened up numerous opportunities that have enabled me to pursue these interests. I want to thank everyone at GHEI for taking them time to share their lives and culture with me. My relationships with all of you are what have fueled my passion to pursue this line of work; I think of you all often!

--Katrina