As my practicum experience is gradually coming to a close, I can’t help but reflect on my experience so far, looking back at where I started from and the growth I have experienced. After a few mishaps regarding my approach to make sense of the data I was tasked with analyzing, I found myself thinking back to my boy scout days when our instructor would always remind us to “begin with the end in mind”.
I have learnt a great deal from this experience, including the importance of planning, understanding the goals of the work that needs to be done, and fashioning an approach that adequately answers the questions that need answering before starting to work. I have also learned what goes into planning and execution of a study, and important considerations to be made in planning and implementing public health work. Most importantly, I learned a lot about myself and how necessity forces growth.
Despite being a mostly remote experience, I was fortunate to have an accessible preceptor that provided guidance and resource persons that could help at different stages of the work we were doing, making my experience much less difficult than it could have been. I am also glad to have met other members of the organization I worked for and made some friends along the way, many of whom have contributed in some way to my experience so far. Having bagged these additional skills, I look forward to applying them in future public health work and in other spheres of my life.
Hello! My name is Quintin Van Dyk and I am an MPH student in the Global Health concentration at UNC Gillings. I have been in Tucson, AZ for the last two months completing my practicum with Casa Alitas, a humanitarian aid organization that provides shelter and other resources to asylum seekers after they cross the nearby border.
Since I last wrote, a lot has happened. Casa Alitas has continued to deal with the effects of significant US immigration policy changes that took place in early to mid-May. New policies, such as the Asylum Transit Ban and the end of Title 42 have caused large demographic changes within Casa Alitas. There have been large influxes of arrivals by asylum seekers coming from Asian and African countries like India and Mauritania. This has been a challenge for Casa Alitas, as their staff wasn’t equipped to handle such a large volume of guests that do not speak English or Spanish. Some of these guests also have unique dietary restrictions, which has made it difficult for the organization to quickly adapt and provide food that all guests are able to eat.
I have been spending a lot of my time working with the program director at Casa Alitas on a research project to better understand the impact of immigration policies like Title 42 on asylum seekers attempting to cross the border and enter the United States. I started by cleaning a large set of raw data that the organization has collected over the last few years and am currently working on building data visualizations that show how trends at Casa Alitas have changed in response to new federal policies. We are hopeful that this project will help the organization better prepare for future policy changes and also understand which countries of origin have been most disproportionately impacted by these policies in the form of medical conditions, family separations, and loss of sponsors.
In my free time, I have continued to volunteer with other local humanitarian aid organizations in the Tucson area like Tucson Samaritans and Green Valley Samaritans. I recently went on a backcountry water drop trip with Tucson Samaritans where we hiked through small canyons and arroyos in the desert north of the border to resupply water boxes. I have also spent time going on hikes and enjoying the amazing sunsets that the Sonoran Desert has to offer. I have really enjoyed my summer in Tucson and am very grateful for the opportunity that I have had to work with Casa Alitas. I hope you are all having a great summer as well!
Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, poses an enormous health burden in Uganda. Severe malaria is a life-threatening form of the disease and one of the top causes of death for children in Uganda. For my practicum, I’m working on an observational study of severe malaria in children at St. Paul’s Level IV Health Center in Kasese, Uganda. The objective of this study is to describe the epidemiology of severe malaria among children in the Kasese district. We are looking at aspects such as incidence of severe malaria, treatments received at St. Paul’s, and patient outcomes 14 days post-discharge. We hope that results may illuminate areas for improvement that will be shared with St. Paul’s and may ultimately lead to better care. The UNC – MUST – PHEALED Consortium, a strong collaborative partnership that has been working and implementing projects in the Bugoye area for several years, leads this study in collaboration with St. Paul’s Health Center.
I am personally interested in this issue due to seeing the effects of malaria in Cameroon, where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years. During my time there, I saw first-hand the challenges with malaria prevention, and the morbidity and mortality caused by malaria in the surrounding communities. In essence, I was exposed to the realities of living in an underserved malaria-endemic region. Gaining an understanding of these challenges has motivated me to continue working on malaria.
I am lucky to be working with other highly motivated partners in Uganda on this study. I am directly working with members of PHEALED, the implementing partner in the UNC-MUST-PHEALED consortium, and two clinician research assistants at St. Paul’s. Despite collecting data every day, including weekends, the team has always stayed positive and remained available. There is an atmosphere of collaboration, combining the medical expertise of the research assistants with the research study expertise of the PHEALED study coordinator, project manager, and UNC team. Working alongside them has been an absolute pleasure.
Views while hiking up a hill near Bugoye.
Outside of work at St. Paul’s, I have the pleasure of staying in Bugoye, a beautiful village located at the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains. There is superb Arabica coffee grown between 1500m and 2000m of altitude in these hills, and I enjoy amazing Ugandan tea each morning with breakfast. Working in the office with PHEALED staff is filled with relationship-building and laughter that breaks up long days of work. Additionally, the Bugoye community is very friendly and welcoming. When I go hiking or jogging, I usually end up with a trail of 10-20 children who join me for a while, giggling the whole way. While hiking up a local hill, four little girls ran up after me to give me a piece of jackfruit. Living in Bugoye is filled with joyful moments like these.
Although working on this study and seeing severely ill children at the health center is very challenging, I’m incredibly grateful to contribute, even in a small way, to hopefully improving care and outcomes for children with severe malaria in the future. These challenges are contrasted with the great privilege of being warmly welcomed in Kasese and Bugoye, providing me with an opportunity to fully immerse myself in the rich culture of Uganda.
