It’s hard to believe that it’s already the beginning of April and that our second semester is drawing to a close. My classmates and I are returning to school today after a ten day break thanks to Pesach. We have 2 more weeks of classes, another virology quiz and then a month of final exams.
I spent part of my Pesach vacation catching up on studies (ask me anything about a parasite, I won’t know the answer, but I will shudder involuntarily) and taking care of other pesky chores like taxes and filing my FAFSA for next year. However I also had the opportunity, along with 3 MSIH friends, to travel to Petra and Wadi Rum in Jordan.
I don’t want to spend my entire stint as MSIH first year blogger forcing strangers to look at my vacation pictures. However, when considering blog topics, travelling to another country seemed much more interesting than tales of flipping through Microbiology cards and falling asleep on my Pharmacology textbook (in the middle of the day, while sitting at my desk, because it’s just that fascinating).*
These travel stories also represent to me one of the most unique things about MSIH. When I decided to go back to school I asked a friend for advice. She had just completed a particularly demanding MFA program and suggested that I choose the years of my life that I didn’t want to be there for and devote those to graduate school.
My friend was joking, but when considering medical schools, I spent a lot of time wrestling with her humorous advice. I knew I wanted to pursue international health, work with the underserved and see as much of the world as possible, and the idea of putting my life on hold for four years while I acquired necessary skills seemed wholly unpalatable. It also didn’t make sense, from an educational standpoint, to spend four years learning the art of healing in a setting completely divorced from the context in which I wanted to practice it.
In one sense, going to medical school here is a lot like going to medical school anywhere else. Classes and studying take up most of our time, and most of our lectures aren’t related to global health. They are the same classes you get at medical schools in the states. This education is obviously necessary and hugely important. It teaches us what we need to know so that we can become the doctors we want to be. However, I have sometimes wondered why I moved halfway around the world, far away from family and friends, to sit at a desk and read the same textbooks I would be reading in the US.
Our curriculum does provide global health opportunities. Global health modules let us focus on particular topics we are interested in and clinical days bring us into contact with a diverse group of people, ranging from children at a cross cultural elementary school, to Holocaust survivors, to the local Bedouin population.
However, in my experience, our curriculum is not really what defines our global health education. The real education happens in the spaces in between medical studies. Whether we are teaching English in a Bedouin village, volunteering at the refugee clinics in Tel Aviv, experiencing the helplessness that comes with learning a new language and culture, or simply taking some time to travel and explore the corner of the world that we have found ourselves in, we have many opportunities to experience new things, meet new people and do life (the literal translation of the Hebrew phrase ose chaim, which means “have fun”).
During our Pesach trip, my classmates and I spent a day and a half exploring the spectacular ruins of Petra. We went on an afternoon tour of the nature preserve of Wadi Rum, rode camels through the desert and ate a meal under the stars that was cooked in sand. We had fun, did life and came back to Israel refreshed, ready to tackle classes and final exams.
Living here is not always perfect. In fact, there are times when it can be downright awful. The process of cultural adjustment, paired with the extreme pressure of medical education, can be difficult and discouraging. I miss family, friends and the comfortable, familiar life that I had in the states. But I also get to learn medicine, see some amazing places and have a pretty great time in the process.
Besides, if you have to learn about larvae that live in your eyeball (Your. Eyeball. People. You can apparently feel them crawling around in there.), the place to do it is on the balcony of a Wadi Musa hotel after a day hiking around one of the seven new wonders of a world that’s basically filled with wonderful things. - blogger of the month, Angel Eads
* Pharmacology really is interesting. I promise. My falling asleep has more to do with my being narcoleptic.**
**I’m not actually narcoleptic, at least not in the diagnosed, medical disease sense of the word. I just really like to sleep.
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