On this scorching hot summer day, I climbed exhausted through the bumpy, mosquito- infested path to the run-down Tanzanian orphanage, anxious and unsure of what to expect. My mind was pacing with questions and scenarios: Will I be capable of helping the orphanage NGUYEN 1 distribute malaria vaccines? Will handing out mosquito nets be hard? What if the children don’t like me? What if I get fired? What if I hand out the wrong vaccine? What if somebody accidently dies?
A half hour later, these questions were momentarily forgotten as I was being served scrambled eggs and Peri-Peri chili sauce over fries while listening to the orphanage director, Mr. Genoshi, talk about his medical experiences in giving emergency aid to Rwandans during the Tutsi genocide. In the following weeks, I spent hundreds of hours in sweat, distributing mosquito nets and anti-malarial vaccinations to orphans and local villagers. By the end of the trip, I realized how much I enjoyed giving medical aid to less-fortunate individuals.
It was the smiles on the orphans’ faces when I provided them with food, stories, and vaccination shots that made me decide to pick the medical field. Traveling has also influenced my decision to pursue medicine by exposing me to impoverished areas, desperately in need of health care. For example, on a recent trip to Southeast Asia, I visited a small island village on the banks of the Mekong. This impoverished village boasted a large fabric shop in its center where many children worked in dirty, polluted and depressing conditions sewing clothing for foreign travelers. Many of these children had diseases covering their face, such as scabies and lice, with little or no access to health care.
After a discussion with the owner of the shop, I discovered that these children started working at an incredibly young age to support their families from starvation, and to avoid working in the Southeast Asia sex industry. If I had heard about this run-down shop from a fellow traveler, I would have shivered in horror at the nightmarish visions of slavery work in my head. However, watching the dedication and talent each child displayed, made me long to help these children out by providing them food and medical treatment. In addition, it made me realize that it is impossible to judge the condition in one country using my biased American experience.
NGUYEN 2 However, this experience’s most important contribution was cementing my passion to become a medical doctor to help individuals with little access to health care in impoverished countries. Exotic medical experiences similar to the one I had in the Tanzanian orphanage and the Laotian island village have demonstrated the fundamental role that travel has played in my life. In comparison, I had volunteered for a Kaiser Permanente hospital back in the States, but this experience left me relatively unsatisfied.
Instead of shadowing anesthesiologists in the ER and watching them perform life-saving injections on patients, I was delivering blood between hospital rooms. With no patient experience, my exposure to the medical field at Kaiser Permanente was not only unstimulating, but also plain out boring. However, in the jungles of Africa, despite that fact that I frequently got bitten by mosquitoes and deal with beggars, I enjoyed distributing mosquito nets and vaccines for less fortunate beings.
Here, I felt useful and beneficial for society. Seeing the smiles on my patients’ faces was the reward that attracted me to medicine. I would now trek to the South American medicinal capital, Lima, to confirm my interest in medicine. My travels abroad in Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe also inspired and enlightened my adventure with research experience. Although I had valuable research experience helping my biochemistry professor investigate footprinting gels, which revealed the location of proteins on DNA, I found unappealing the amount of hours spent working on lab gels in solitary. I needed a career that required human interaction. This epiphany came during my research at San Marcos University in Lima, Peru.
My research widened my view on research and illustrated how research can help bolster medical knowledge. While eating chicharrones on the dusty Peruvian roadside, my CouchSurfing hosts in Peru, analytical science majors with minors in English, would listen with strong interest to explanations of my research of the Bluetongue virus that NGUYEN 3 morbidly killed cattle. Even though solitary research work may not always be interesting, all research will contribute to expanding medical knowledge, further the medical field.
Travel has not only had an enlightening, inspiring influence on my decision to pursue medicine, it has also made me realize the importance of medicine in every corner of society – whether in an impoverished village in the Tanzanian jungle, a rural island city along the wild Mekong or a top-rate medical university in Peru. I intend to integrate my research, volunteering, and academic experiences to help me with future research and patient interactions. Most importantly, I intend to bring my open-minded perspective of life, enhanced through traveling, to practice as a doctor and to provide much needed health care for less-fortunate beings in impoverished third world countries.