Sruthi Sundaram

09/05/14
Reflective essay
Grassroots On Site Work (GROW) Internship
In May and June of 2014, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in an experience of
a lifetime. I traveled to Mae Sot, Thailand for a six week internship during which I was able to
work with a local organization, Social Action for Women (SAW) to implement a health
education program for Burmese migrants living in the Thai-Myanmar border region near Mae
Sot. I was presented with this amazing opportunity by a student organization called GlobeMed
at UC. GlobeMed is a national network that partners 55 universities across the US with
grassroots organizations that address public health around the world. The network spans Central
America, South America, Africa, India, and East Asia. Our chapter partners with SAW in rural
Thailand although our target communities are Burmese migrants living in the region. During
this internship, the five of us selected to represent our chapter this year worked on site with SAW
in planning improvements to the third phase of the Community Health Outreach Program
(CHOP III). In addition, we were able to visit all of the communities targeted by the program,
witness all of SAWs other programs, travel with their Mobile Medical Team (MMT) and
interview the SAW staff, leaders, and target community members. By the end of the internship,
we made several improvements to CHOP III, discussed the budget for this coming years project,
and formulated a better way of communication throughout the year. We also developed a precise
model for the monitoring and evaluation of CHOP III as it progresses throughout the year.
As I reflect back on this experience, I feel so much nostalgia. To this day, I still cannot
believe that it actually happened. I think the most significant part of the experience for me was
all the amazing relationships I was able to form with the SAW staff and the migrant community
members. The GlobeMed model integrates partnership as its main focus. We always consider
ourselves partners with SAW, not donors. This partnership is essential for the sustainability of
any service project. As GROW interns, we were representing our whole chapter here at UC, and
we all took that responsibility very seriously. Before this internship, I had already been part of
GlobeMed for two years. I had done intense amounts of research into global health, our partner,
the work they do, and the details of our project. However, none of what one reads in a book can
prepare him for the actual experience. All five of us became extremely good friends with the
SAW staff involved with CHOP. I will talk about three staff members that I felt particularly
close to. The staff member we all knew the best was Aung Tuo Lin. He liked to be called ATL
and we always addressed him as such. He is my age but has been living with SAW since he was
a child. He is probably one of the most warm-hearted, dedicated people I have ever met, and he
went with us everywhere, serving as our guide with SAW because of his quite decent level of
proficiency in English. The man behind everything in SAWthe face of SAW as you might call
himis Dr. Htin Zaw. Dr. Htin Zaw has the most amazing life story. Having worked all his life
as an advocate for human rights, he was a political prisoner in Myanmar for five years. After
getting released, he came to Thailand, where he has since dedicated his life to providing
healthcare for Burmese migrants who cannot be treated at Thai hospitals because of their lack of
documentation. He took us with him on the MMT which travels to very rural communities,
taking basic healthcare directly to the people who cannot access hospitals due to lack of
transportation. Despite all his achievements, he is one of the most humble men I have ever met,
and always joked around with us. The last staff member I would like to specifically mention is
Ye Ye Win. Ye Ye Win is the director CHOP, the specific program that we fund. She does not
speak English, although she understands what we say quite well. Her dedication and immense
knowledge in the material taught at the CHOP workshops always astounded me. I felt so
motivated by her and strove to work as hard as I could in my responsibilities.
We were also able to form relationships with the people that SAW serves. Through 19
different programs SAW provides health education for women in rural Phop Phra, a grade school
for children in Mae Sot, and shelter and healthcare, including HIV treatment, for abandoned
children and women who have escaped or been rescued from human trafficking. My favorite
place personally was the Healthcare House. The Healthcare House is neighboring to the SAW
Office where we were based, and whenever we had downtime during the day, I used to walk
over to the Healthcare House and sit with the women there. This particular program gave shelter
and treatment to women and children who were HIV+. None of the women spoke English and
many times ATL was not around to translate. However, they were so hospitable to me, they
always motioned me to come in and sit with them. One time, one of the women even brought
out a Lego set, and together we managed to make a Lego train. I left there feeling so satisfied
with that small achievement because I felt as if I had finally surpassed the barrier that language
sometimes puts between emotional connection with others, so that I could enjoy the peacefulness
of sitting quietly and mutually working with another person without the need for verbal
language.
This internship helped me achieve an understanding of both the learning outcomes I
detailed in my proposal. The first was to recognize the interdependence of world economies,
political systems and the environment. As a largely global community, it is very important to
recognize the connections formed between nations all around the world. SAW, a grassroots
organization in Thailand, works with the Thai government to fast-track the documentation
process for Burmese migrants fleeing oppression from the militaristic rule of their government.
To get basic education that will promote good health in its target communities, SAW chose to
partner with GlobeMed, a network based in the US. Just for this one project, there are three
countries involved. This does not even touch the surface of all the various grassroots
organizations located along the Thai-Burma border, all of whom collaborate at the international
level. In Mae Sot, we were able to meet a GROW team from another university working with
the Burmese Womens Union, and later on, in Chiang Mai, we met with a GROW team working
with the MAP Foundation. All of these organizations show the interdependence that countries
exhibit with each other as part of the global community. Together, through partnership, they are
able to achieve their goals. The second learning outcome was to interact with individuals from
different cultures and express a sensitivity, appreciation and respect for the complex range of
experiences of diverse peoples. We achieved this by conducting video interviews with SAW
staff, SAW leaders, community leaders, community members, and peer educators. In these
interviews, we asked all of these people about their histories, life stories, and their hopes for the
future. We then brought back their stories, which is currently in the process of being edited and
will eventually be shared with our chapter. By conducting these interviews, we were able to gain
primary source information about the lives of very different groups of people involved with our
project, whether it be from those implementing the project or those benefitting from it.
In preparing for this internship, I set towards reflecting on why I was in GlobeMed and
what this opportunity meant to me. In regard to this, I read a wonderful editorial piece on a
concept known in public health as duffle bag medicine. This editorial piece is written by a
volunteer who witnessed a very harmful form of volunteerism in Guatemala. The volunteerism
was conducted by a group of people who were there more for selfish reasons than otherwise.
There are those who go to developing nations on service brigades purely to boost their resume
and post pictures on social media with children to create a sensation. This writer describes a
group who came once to distribute donated vitamins to a community and then details how this
type of one-time donation can seriously harm the population. When vitamins are given to a
population, the majority of who lack proper education, without any instructions on their use or
monitoring of dosage, they can induce serious health issues from constipation to STIs and other
diseases transmitted by unsterilized injections (Roberts). The author instead suggests using a
learning, open-minded attitude to learn about the population we are serving and to focus on what
they actually need instead of what we think they need (Roberts). Learning about this concept
made me really appreciate the uniqueness of GlobeMeds partnership model. By partnering with
an organization whose staff are from the very population they serve, we are able to really
identify what the target communities actual need. I thus went on this internship determined to
learn as much as I could without making judgments of the people or practices I observed.
This internship was also incredibly unique in that my experiences have actually come in
useful in the public health courses I am taking currently in preparation for the masters degree I
will pursue next year. A course that I am taking currently, Evidence-Based Public Health,
focuses on evidence-based methods of implementing programs and changing policies. Last week
we were discussing types of studies conducted in populations for public health research, and I
was able to contribute the pre-post model of quantitative study. Of course, this is the model we
developed for CHOP III when we were discussing monitoring and evaluation of the project
throughout the year. In the same class, we also discussed the effectiveness of collecting both
quantitative and qualitative data, another aspect that was newly implemented for CHOP III. The
addition of the qualitative data collection from peer educators about behavioral changes they
observed in their communities after the workshops will hopefully give us an idea not only of the
results of the workshops, but their effectiveness and actual impact. I was thus able to use my
experience to contribute to a very engaging discussion in my Evidence-based Public Health
class.
A huge part of the purpose of the GROW internship is to build that connection with the
partner that can be lost by such a large geographical distance. Each year, GROW interns work
face to face with the partner and then bring that experience back to their chapter. In fact, during
the application and interviewing process for being selected for this internship, one of the
deciding factors was our ideas on bring GROW back to UC. It was with this purpose that we
made the video interviews. We wanted to interview not only our partner but also the target
community members who were supposed to benefit from our project. Each of them had their
own unique stories to tell, which we recorded in over 10 hours of authentic footage. This
footage is in the editing process and will be presented to our chapter. It is the first time a UC
GROW team has done such an endeavor, and we hope that these interview videos can exhibit the
personal side to our partnership as well as raise awareness of the struggles that Burmese migrants
face in the border region.
Overall, the GROW internship was an experience of a lifetime. I will cherish everyone I
met and everything I saw and use my experience toward my own future career. I will be one of
the pioneering students pursuing the Global Health concentration for my Masters in Public
Health (MPH), a new program that is going to be added to UCs MPH curriculum starting
Summer 2015. I will continue to participate in GlobeMed for the next two years and farther own
in the future, I hope to lead a set of programs similar to SAWs health education and mobile
medical team in rural southern India.
Links to Cited Materials: https://www.globalbrigades.org/media/Duffle_Bag_Medicine.pdf