Jennifer Lee

Final Reflection: Enter the Fire

After I returned from my Global Brigades trip to Panama, I had a mixture of feelings about what I saw and what I did. The immediate question from my friends and family upon returning was always, “So you went to Panama, what did you do? What was your trip all about?”, and at this time, I would always frame my answer in the most objective way possible, because I was not really sure of how to make sense of what really happened. I would tell them the facts: “We raised money to buy our plane tickets and medication to help an impoverished community in Panama. We actually saw over four-hundred patients in three days, and the clinic we set up was in a rural elementary school with flies buzzing around everywhere. I helped by filling prescriptions, taking vitals, speaking Spanish to take down patient histories, assisting in tooth extractions and cleanings, and teaching children how to brush their teeth.” The end. All the conflicting feelings I had about my experience boiled down to this bland and neutral answer. Meanwhile, I was internally questioning did we really made an impact? Were the community members glad we came? After digging deeper into the world of global health and service through class discussions, selected readings, and reflective writings over the course of the semester, I realized that I was not alone in my struggle to make sense of my experience. A lot of my classmates, scholars, and poets have thought about the same questions that I did and articulated them into tangible words and rational arguments. I would not say that we came up with any solutions or answers to the questions that we posed in class, because that was not the point of the course. But, we did struggle together over some challenging readings and concepts to articulate the questions that needed to be asked, such as is service good? Why don’t we talk about service? What do brigades mean for us? What do brigades mean for the communities we enter? These are a few of the questions that have been brought up through our readings and discussions. In this final reflection, I will try to explain some of the knowledge that I think I have gained from reflecting on my Global Brigades experience through this course. Currently, I have plans to become a physician, and the knowledge I have gained through this course has definitely made an impact on how I view the institution of medicine and my future plans. Part of Loyola’s mission is to “expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice, and faith”, and I have the full intention of applying what I have gained from my experience abroad and in this course to live out this mission through my professional career as a physician.

           We started out the semester asking why do we serve in the first place? Why did we go on this brigade? Was it for good reasons? These challenging question came straight out of the gate on our first reflection on Adam Davis’s essay “What We Don’t Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Service”. This was a great first reading, because it opened up the discussion that service can have a dark side, which I truly believe exists. It is a struggle to admit that we are capable of doing service without the truest of intentions, but I think that being wary of the instances of when service is not good is an important step to doing service that is good. After reading this essay, I saw how easy it could be to do service with selfish intentions, such as winning praise. However, I realized that the time we spent reflecting together during the brigade helped to put us in a good position to avoid falling into the dark side of service. We reminded each other that we were there to place the patients we met at the highest priority and to learn from them and the Global Brigades medics as much as possible.

           Another challenging reading was Ivan Illich’s speech, “To Hell with Good Intentions”, which posed the idea that, even when we have the best of intentions, service might not be good. There are intended and unintended consequences that can arise from service. In connection to Loyola’s mission statement, it is important to emphasize how knowledge is imperative for service. Without knowing the local context or knowledge about how your actions will impact a community beyond your intended goals, there runs the risk of making the situation worse. I think this reading resonated with me the most, because prior to my Global Brigades trip, I did little research and had little knowledge on the community I was planning to help. But, how can you help those you know nothing about? I realized that most of my conflicting feelings about the trip was due to logical criticisms. We did not have enough of the medicines that were needed to treat the prevalent diseases in the community. This was obvious from the main complaints I was writing down in triage in comparison to the medicines we counted during inventory. We didn’t know too much about the culture either. Therefore, I cannot definitively say if the work we did was good, because you cannot understand the impact you are making on a community from the course of one week. We had to have faith in the in country staff to coordinate our service in a way that would make a positive impact, however for any future international service work I may embark on in my career as a physician I will take Illich’s critique to heart and do as much research as possible in order to avoid unintended consequence if at all possible and rest easier that the work I do will be good.

           Although a lot knowledge I gained from this course was from critical thinking on the experience I had, this course also helped me to think of the possibilities that are created from learning. After reading several poems and hearing my classmates’ thoughts, there is a lot of hope to create change in the world in the Global North and the Global South. One of my favorite excerpts from the poem, “Sunrise”, that we read in our civic reflection discussion by Mary Oliver was “What is the name/ of the deep breath I would take/ over and over/ for all of us? Call it/ whatever you want, it is/ happiness, it is another one/ of the ways to enter/ fire”. In the discussion of this poem, as a class we talked about our plans for the future in our action plans. It is inspiring to think that our plans are not done after this class or this brigade. We still have a lot we need to accomplish, because we all want to have happiness and we all are willing to “enter the fire” for it. In my action plan, I specified how my professional development will help me to make an impact in the field of medicine to bring more happiness into the world and how I plan to enter the fire by serving others through my professional career as a physician. My Global Brigades Trip to Panama created a spark of curiosity that has lead me to investigate ways that I can get involved in global health. My first goal, in the last year that I have at Loyola, is to spread the word about Global Brigades and to share with others what I have learned in order to make Global Brigades an even stronger and effective organization. I also want to continue to learn more about global health while I am at an institution that has so many resources and knowledgeable professors that can help me to dig deeper. I already had plans to go to medical school prior to this class, but now I am very interested in going to a school that will help me to build upon what I have learned in Panama and help to make me an agent of change in the medical world, both locally and globally. Lastly, I have multiple paths about where my life as a physician may take me in my action plan, because I am not quite sure what opportunities I may be given to make an impact in the world. I do know that I would like some portion of my life to be spent trying to help better the health of people in the Global South or other economically disadvantaged areas. As a physician, I will look beyond the science of disease and apply the concepts I have learned from this class and my Global Brigades experience to work toward a greater global health equity and have enough faith in the possibility of happiness to enter the fire in order to do so. After learning as much as I have from Dr. Green and my classmates in UNIV 292, I will do my best to “expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice, and faith”.