Living the dream

One of my primary motivations for getting a PhD was to open the door to opportunities to teach and mentor students. (Another motivation was avoiding the $50,000 in debt that the MPH program at Emory would have required). The older I get, the more I realize that most of my "gifts" are not so much natural abilities as the product of the many privileged opportunities for training, mentorship and practice. My hope is that in a small way, having a PhD in Nutrition from Cornell (which I should qualify as most Haitians do with "si bondye vle" - God willing) will better equip me to create similar opportunities in a university or
other research/training institution somewhere like Nairobi or Rwanda or even (more and more as years go by) in my hometown of Chicago.

This dream of teaching is one of the the things that drew me to my current research site in Haiti. The clinic where I work is sponsoring a Masters in Public Health (MPH) program in collaboration with the Cornell Medical School in NYC and Quisqueya University, a local institution. The vision of the program's founders is that by providing a high quality MPH in Haiti, seasoned practitioners will remain actively working in country. Many people who leave Haiti for advanced training never return (which is something I cannot personally fault anyone for). The program is using a unique team teaching model that tries to pair an academic from an international institution with a Haitian faculty member.

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to support a colleague of mine from Cornell who came to teach a 2-week module on public health nutrition to a group of 35 Haitian health professionals (nurses, physicians, pharmacists, dentists and even a psychologist). Despite missing about half of what was said due to my lack of French (my Cornell colleague is French Canadian), it was a fantastic (but exhausting) chance to participate in the process of designing and delivering an graduate-level course in nutrition. I personally gave about 4-hours worth of lectures and several of the students have asked me to serve as their ongoing mentor for nutrition-focused thesis projects. Though another connection, I am a member of a team developing an internship program at the clinic for undergraduate Nutrition students from Quisqueya and the National University of Haiti. All wonderful experiences for me (although not so helpful in getting my current research done due to the time commitment) - and hopefully not too bad experiences for the students involved.

Like all dreams coming true this one has its reality checks. I'm not the biggest fan of standing up in front of a room and talking. I love the creative process of designing a lecture, developing slides, and imagining what it will sound like....but the actual delivery? Not so much. Hopefully that will change with time and practice.

I've always been a little afraid of becoming a stereotypical academic - focused on the details while missing the reality of things. However, my Cornell season has shown me the tremendous value of being in a community of people committed to advancing knowledge that supports action - who challenge and encourage one another to think bigger and deeper - and where there are concentrated resources like well-equipped libraries and computer systems to support the process. Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how, I would love to keep a foot in both - up the ivory tower and down in the community trenches. A good first step would probably be starting to attend the yoga class offered in my neighborhood here - need to be really flexible to reach between those extremes.