Vanessa Lee, MD/MPH candidate

I was lucky to have the opportunity to travel and work on a global health project in Ethiopia this summer, but now that getting back to medical school means no more time to work internationally, I want to stay connected with the issues I encountered abroad and keep thinking about how students and universities can engage in global health. On Thursday, October 13th, the OHSU Global Health Center is hosting a Global Health Fair in … Read More

Here are a few snapshots of my life in Gimbie. A foreigner toting around a camera creates quite the spectacle in town, but I wanted to try and capture a bit of my day-to-day experience: the people and places I saw on my daily walk through town, the types of clinics I visited for my research project, and the verdant countryside that nestles Gimbie between steep hills and valleys. I think that sometimes developing countries, … Read More

My charge this summer was to learn about local health care capacity with regard to pregnancy and delivery—pretty broad goals, but Dr. Nardos and I decided to try to administer two surveys: one for formal health care providers working at clinics, and one for midwives and other lay providers I happen to meet in the community.  The surveys basically ask what these people do on a regular basis, how they handle certain prenatal and obstetric … Read More

Fayaada! (that’s the beginning of a greeting in Oromifa, and one of the most useful words I’ve picked up)  I’m sad to say that sending updates from the past few weeks was a bit futile, because Gimbie was without internet for the vast majority of my stay there.  In a way it was nice—I’ve read more novels in five weeks than I had my entire first year of medical school—but it’s nice to be back … Read More

I’m flying out in about 14 hours to New York, then Istanbul, then Addis Ababa to do research on maternal health in Ethiopia this summer. The last four weeks of medical school were quite a grind and I’ve barely recovered from our final exam, so it certainly hasn’t hit me yet that I’ll be spending the next few weeks on my own in a completely new culture. I’ve been looking forward to this project for … Read More