Tiritose Sustainable Travel has been working with students from the Ohio State University College of Health Science for 3 years. And what started out as just one 4th year student coming to Zimbabwe and working with me by a stroke of luck, has turned out to be a very impactful partnership, which saw the numbers increasing firstly to 3 in the second year and to 6 in the third year. I could not be happier!
The third cohort of students on a medical internship in Zimbabwe are interested in a diverse range of specialties, including obstetrics & gynecology (OB-GYN), paediatrics, internal medicine, ear nose and throat (ENT) as well as psychiatry. They arrived on Sunday 4th February in the afternoon, and went straight to the Tiritose Sustainable Travel volunteer accommodation in Mt Pleasant, Harare. This group was to start their rotation in Karoi, at a rural hospital.
The students spent a week on a clinical medical rotation internship in rural Zimbabwe, and I went to pick them up, so that they could start their placement at city hospitals. When I got to the hospital, sister McCarty was at church and the students had gone for a walk in the wild (which turns out to be their favourite thing about being surrounded by nature after a long day of work). Once they got back to the house, we probably spent an hour and a half chatting about their time in this rural environment.
Story after story, it was fascinating to hear Van Don as a musician, enjoyed the morning devotions/prayers because he could sing along and compare hymns with those they sing in the U.S. He mentioned how there was only 1 that was sung exactly the same in Zimbabwe as in the U.S., including how the music is written. On the clinical side, he enjoyed watching the procedures, delivering babies and generally enhanced his understanding of medicine. Van Don is a social being, and so he experienced some serious withdrawal from social media, his phone and chatting with his mom at least once a day.
Another student on the medical internship, Sola got to name a new born baby Daniel because the couple wanted an English name, and seeing as Sola was the American in the room when the baby was born, the naming rights fell on her shoulders.
Everyone but Van Don who is a strict New Yorker wanted to stay longer at the rural hospital, and I have had to review the time students spend there, and have now increased it from 1 week to 2-weeks of the 4-weeks in total that they spend with Tiritose Sustainable Travel in Zimbabwe.
Cheers to matching with their first-choice placements as they graduate from medical school. I have to say that every 4th year who has done a clinical rotation with us has matched with their first-choice residency programme, and so these guys have that good run of luck working in their favour.
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