The Start

When I started at Northeastern 2 years ago, I never imagined that I would be spending a month in Kenya studying Swahili and public health. How could I? While public health and epidemiology has fascinated me for years, do you really need to travel to Africa, almost as far away from my home in San Jose, California, as you can get?
Well, yes and no. I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Richard Wamai, my Dialogue’s trip leader, during my freshman year, and ever since that time, I’ve thought that studying in Kenya would be an amazing experience, but not one that was necessarily “right” for me. I learned a lot from Dr. Wamai taking his Introduction to Global Health course, but what you learn from a textbook and a powerpoint can only take you so far. After dipping my toes into public health, and the even broader subject of global health, I knew that I needed to get out into the world to see for myself how public health works.

While public health attracted me to the Kenya dialogue, the culture and people of Kenya are what I expect to be affected most by. I’ve never been to Africa and my understanding of what life is like there is limited to what TV and movies have told me. I’m so lucky for the chance to get to learn about a totally new culture and I think that the experiences I share with the people I meet and the places I will have the biggest impact on my life.

This dialogue won’t be just about touring Kenya, far from it. Knowing Dr. Wamai, I expect some pretty rigorous coursework from our classes at the University of Nairobi. My first goal, of the many goals I have for this dialogue, is to learn a lot about how the politics and culture of Kenya influence its health system, but that’s a totally academic goal. Personally, I want to try and ride an elephant. Elephants have always been my favorite animals, and I know we’ll be going to an elephant sanctuary during the trip and I just can’t get there soon enough. Just getting to see an elephant up close would be amazing.

I am a little afraid missing out on something just because of the sheer scope of the trip. We have so much to do and see, all of which is amazing, and I hope we can get as much out of each experience as possible, but we do have a lot to do, and I anticipate being exhausted a lot. Good thing we’ll have a lot of Kenyan coffee around to help keep us going!
There’s so much to be excited about and to look forward to on this dialogue. From the hikes we’ll be taking around Nairobi, the guided safari in one of Kenya’s famous wildlife reserves, the public health projects we will be working on, to the people I’ll get to meet, not just those in Kenya, but also my fellow dialogue students. So while I’m looking forward to everything I’ll get to learn thanks to this trip, I’m most looking forward to experiencing everything with Huskies that I hope to get to know really well during the trip. I think it will be an unforgettable trip for all of us.