Brian Kaiser
Pharmacy, Class of 2008
Life altering, gut-wrenching or heart-breaking: any one of these terms could be used to describe this experience. I never, not even for one minute, thought that I would be affected so profoundly from this trip.
I left Boston with a very clinical mindset. After four and a half years in pharmacy school, I thought that I would be above all of the emotional aspects of a trip like this. In my mind, every person that I would encounter would be a case study, a way to observe the healthcare system in a severely underdeveloped country. That entire concept seems laughable now… People were sick with diseases that were nearly unheard of in the United States. All of these people had families, loved ones, friends, feelings, so much so that I felt quite overwhelmed. More so than overwhelmed, I felt angry. Angry and cheated in that I am nearly finished with my schooling, I am almost a doctor, and I could not have helped any of those people. I am not educated in treating basic infectious diseases, but I could have helped if they had hyperlipidemia or high blood pressure or diabetes and access to a state of the art laboratory. I feel that my education is woefully inadequate in the basics of saving lives and reducing immediate morbidity and mortality…
Perhaps the more important thing that I realized during the trip was the level of education of the majority of the people that we met. Before coming, I was under the impression that the people would not be knowledgeable about the workings of the world. Yet the persons in that [district level development] meeting not only knew policies and procedures that each country had regarding development in Niger, they knew the effects and why this polices created double standards. I felt so poorly uneducated. There were people here that do not have an education in the sense of American thinking. But, I do not believe for one minute that any person in that development meeting would have had any difficulty holding their own in a conversation with some of the most brilliant economic minds in the educated and developed world.
I learned more in this trip than I have in years of secondary and post-secondary education. I hope that this feeling I have now of not only wanting to better myself but to try and educate those around me, stays strong. I never want this feeling to lessen or to be forgotten.