Professor Janet Dewan
College of Nursing Faculty (Bouvé)
Niger, in Saharan Africa, is ranked near the bottom for many development indices by the United Nations and that is where I recently brought a group of Northeastern University students. I worked as an anesthetist in Agadez, Niger, many years ago, and have always regretted that I had been so busy delivering health care during a period of devastating drought that I had seen little of the country. So when a colleague, who does ethnographic research, asked me to be second faculty for a political science course he was conducting I didn’t hesitate.
The faculty and enrolled students had met for seminar on Northeastern’s campus before the trip. From the first seminar I was inspired by the idealism of the students and challenged to safely guide them to a fulfilling experience. Most had not traveled in the Third World but they shared a common desire to understand and alleviate poverty. None were nurses, though some had special interest in healthcare.
During our trip we saw first hand the consequence of lack of access to elemental health services and had the opportunity to discuss solutions with Nigérien leaders and citizens, and members of the US diplomatic team. Traveling in a country without the infrastructure to secure or distribute basic medicines or vaccines makes delivering an anesthetic in Massachusetts seem relatively easy by comparison. We visited health clinics and saw the effects of neglected disease; chronic infection; and lack of sanitation, trained personnel, and essential medications. We realized that it is easier to collect donations than to figure out how to distribute them.
Despite the obstacles, we accomplished several projects subsidized by donations from members of the Northeastern University community. Our students purchased a bull and cart for a village to use for subsistence farming activities, distributed school supplies collected in the Eliot School of Needham through the Pencil Box Project, and visited and provided support to widows who had been given goats through a project organized by political science graduate students. The experience of seeing poverty face to face and the impact of these simple contributions brought satisfaction and understanding that writing a check alone can’t lend.
Many of us in the anesthesia community have been involved with rescue trips where we deliver health services directly. Anyone who has participated knows how rewarding it is to contribute to the health of an individual or community. Through these types of experiences we also realize that our education and training is a privilege we have, in large part, because of where we were born. Still, after our mission returns home the persistent problem of health care inequality and deprivation remains for most of the world’s people.
You might think that traveling in one of the world’s poorest countries, one with a life expectancy of 45, literacy rate of barely 20% and infant mortality of 145:1000 births1 would have been sad. Yet, seeing the world through the optimistic eyes of college students who were able to connect with the citizens in Niger left me hopeful that their generation has the power to find solutions that will alleviate suffering. The students who traveled with us - future politicians, diplomats, development planners, and clinicians - had the opportunity to glimpse the cultural wealth poverty cannot extinguish and the youthful vision to imagine solutions.