African internship adventures

Getting a black eye from rafting down the Nile River, wrestling with a monkey over peanut butter and having the firstborn child of a host brother named after her were a few of the surprising experiences Britton Tuck-Boutwell, GCSU alumna, shared from her internship in Kenya last week to a small audience in Max Noah Auditorium.

While most community health majors stick within Georgia to complete the 480-hour internship required of them, Tuck-Boutwell was determined to intern abroad and succeeded in attaining an internship with the Foundation for Sustainable Development.

Tuck-Boutwell received her first choice location Kakamega, Kenya, and it required more than a little adjustment, endurance and persistence. There was a language barrier, a diet change and a pollution issue. She had to battle the false, but firmly held, beliefs about white people.

“A lot of Kenyans believe that you are born with a million dollars, you automatically get a job and that a robot does everything for you,” Tuck-Boutwell said.

And then there were the scarier issues like the complete lack of sanitation in the health clinic.

“They don’t wash hands. Needles are just lying around. Sanitation is not a big deal,” Tuck-Boutwell said. “I thought ‘I want to buy you things so you can do this properly.’ ”

But her goal wasn’t to empty her own wallet or to raise funds. The point was to give the Kenyan people tools to help themselves, to create a program that would stay after her three-month stay was over. So she conducted needs assessments in the community and talked to principals of local schools about their needs to pinpoint the most important health issues: HIV/AIDS, malaria, sexually transmitted diseases and overall reproductive health.

From there, Tuck-Boutwell used online resources to create a health manual specifically for teachers. She held a training day where she showed the teachers from several schools how to use it as a guide for their curriculum.

While the process seems straightforward, Tuck-Boutwell encountered obstacles. She was the first intern in Kakamega, and the health clinic thought she was simply there to observe. According to Tuck, her supervisor was unsupportive, and even worse, corrupt.

“He was selling drugs in our pharmacy to another one for more money,” Tuck-Boutwell said. “People are dying in the forest because he is selling to a town 15 minutes away. He was also involved in prostituting young girls in the forest and one was my host sister. When I found that out, it became very personal and very difficult to walk in the door every day.”

Tuck-Boutwell said she also faced many technical difficulties in compiling the manual.

“It took a long time (and) a lot of frustration,” Tuck-Boutwell said. “The Internet was always down, the electricity was out and computers weren’t working. There were all these obstacles of me getting to where I needed to be to do my research.”

Despite the obstacles and the inability to eliminate the corruption she said was in the health clinic, Tuck-Boutwell tried to leave a lasting legacy. She taught the Kakamega people to take better care of themselves. In addition to creating the manual, Tuck-Boutwell taught 700 girls how to perform a self breast exam for breast cancer awareness and taught people how to add soy to their local dish, which adds protein needed by those affected by HIV/AIDs. She also gained an entirely new family that she loves and is still in contact with.

Although rough and intense at times, Tuck-Boutwell recommends an internship with FSD. She notes however that she was the first and last intern in Kakamega. Overall, her presentation in Max Noah was an eye opener to the need of sustainable aid in Kenya for many students and faculty. Heather Wilson, senior history and theater major, felt that this changed her reaction to AIDS in “RENT,” the play presented Feb. 24-28 in Russell Auditorium.

“You have a concept, an idea in your head (of HIV/AIDs),” Wilson said. “But this magnifies it and changes your perspective on the play.”

Posted by Rebecca Burns on Mar 5 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry