At a recent mobile clinic in Kenya, NAU health science major Ashley Bedwell, right, explains to a Maasai mother how to take de-worming medicine. Photo courtesy Ashley Bedwell

African field study exposes students to global health issues

Trading their views of the San Francisco Peaks for a stay beneath the north slope of Mount Kilimanjaro, five NAU students have traveled to the Serengeti in Africa to get a first-hand look at the region's community health issues.

Nursing students Kimberli Dowling, Amy Moore and Vachera Yazzie, along with health science students Amber Ashley and Ashley Bedwell, are in Kenya participating in a five-week field study through the School for Field Studies based out of Salem, Mass. The school coordinates environmental field studies around the globe.

"Our goal is to give these students an international experience so they're able to understand global health issues and what health-care systems are like in other countries," said Karen Plager, NAU associate nursing professor.

The NAU students are joined by more than 20 other undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of public health backgrounds from six different universities in both the United States and Kenya.

During their stay, the students will conduct and analyze a community health assessment in the country's small villages to offer insight into how to improve local health problems, including an escalation in sanitation-related diseases, infant and child diseases, HIV/AIDS and famine.

In addition to gaining international experience in community health in Kenya, the program also teaches students how to link their findings to solutions aimed at empowering the local communities.

After an orientation to life in Kenya—including classes on the people, sociocultural, historical and political issues and health and health-care issues—the students visited a volunteer counseling and testing center for HIV/AIDS and met a traditional Maasai medicine man. They then began their hands-on work with patients.

Within the first week, the students volunteered for a day with a mobile clinic at an elementary school. "Normally a mobile clinic is short-staffed and will usually see about 100 people a day," Yazzie wrote in an e-mail from Kenya. "We saw over 200 women and children."

The students also are going to Maasai bomas—clusters of round mud-and-stick homes surrounded by a fence—to collect community data. They hope to collect data from 90 to 100 children each day with the ultimate goal of 900 children over nine days.

Before the course concludes next month, the students will write a final report after analyzing the data. They will then share the report with leaders of the Maasai villages and with other community stakeholders.

"I couldn't have asked for a better hands-on experience," Bedwell wrote in an e-mail. "The lessons I'm learning here are invaluable and will broaden my horizons in both public and international health."