Xkojb’a ke la Boston!

During our time here in Guatemala, I have been forced to reflect quite a bit on how to respond to our experiences here. When we arrived, I had thought that all I needed to do was apply my existing skills in medicine and public health and my linguistic capacity in Spanish, and I would be able to do good work.

In encountering the limits of my abilities in medicine and public health, my perspective on my remaining training has changed significantly. Before, I thought of the years of training before me as a series of prerequisites; now, I have become aware of the clinical opportunities I need to seek out if I am to become a competent physician to impoverished populations in complex healthcare landscapes like the one we have encountered here. Honestly, in light of our experiences, I feel that 3 years of residency training is not enough—I need to gain an internist’s knowledge of medicine, a pediatrician’s knowledge of children’s health, a psychologist’s aptitude for psychiatric elements of illness, and an obstetrician’s experience and surgical dexterity. This makes the prospect of choosing a specialty for residency more complicated. In any case, this past year will make me a more deliberate learner as I continue in my clinical training.

Another unexpected realization of this year is the narrow scope of the training and education I have pursued thus far. Issues of cultural and socioeconomic justice have only been touched upon in passing in my medical and public health education. While I have a natural predilection to trying to contextualize my experiences in broader perspectives of political economy and history, I have neglected this as a focal practice in my life, partly because I have been overwhelmed by the pace of medical school and partly because this is not something that is emphasized as important for medical students, at least not in my experience at my school. I have experienced a growing awareness of the necessity of anthropologic perspectives and ethnographic practice through my engagement here in Guatemala. I have had inklings of this awareness over the past three years, and I somehow knew that at some point I would probably pursue studies in medical anthropology—to the point that when I started thinking concretely about applying to programs this past fall, I already knew where to look and which schools to consider. In December and January, with the encouragement of Elena, friends and mentors, I submitted applications to a number of schools that offer Master’s programs in anthropology for healthcare professionals.

Of the programs to which I was accepted, I decided that Harvard University’s MA in Social Anthropology with a focus in Medical Anthropology was best suited to my needs. The program offers a broad introduction to anthropological theory and the opportunity for in-depth study of a variety of topics of utmost importance to a student of the health and lives of the global poor. In addition, the institutional partners participating in the Program in Medical Anthropology at Harvard (e.g. Partners in Health and the Dept of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities) are exciting to me as a physician-in-training who hopes to couple critically engaged scholarship and social justice work to clinical medicine.

So I am taking another leave of absence from the MD/MPH program at Northwestern, and Elena and I are making preparations to move to the Boston area this summer. We are looking forward to this next step in our journey, and Elena has already begun to look for jobs in Boston’s non-profit sector. Once we have an apartment, we would love visitors!