From Corporate America To Rural Mozambique
I’ve always known I wanted to go into healthcare. While the other neighborhood kids were playing army or house, I was playing with the doctor kit that my parents bought me for my birthday. The summer after my freshman year, while my friends started their summer internships I packed up my bags and moved to Sumpango, Guatemala to work as a medical volunteer in a rural clinic.
During one rainy, slow afternoon I was putting together posters for an upcoming class on food and hygiene. Almost like a scene out of a movie, a woman burst through the front entrance of the empty clinic and broke the silence. My Spanish did not need to be great to see that something was very wrong with the baby that she was holding in her arms.
Doctors and nurses rushed the young baby into one of the two patient rooms in the clinic and frantically began to try to identify and fix what was wrong. After what seemed like hours the news finally came back that the child had not survived. A mother and father had lost their son from a completely treatable infection that had not been identified soon enough. The ride home on the bus that day was more somber than usual as I reflected on the events that had transpired. On that bumpy bus in Guatemala, I knew that I had to do something.
When I got to school the next semester, I discovered a passion for business that threatened to thwart my plans of doing good through medicine. I began a major in business management, took an internship working in administration for a large hospital system, and had almost sold my soul to “corporate America” when a friend told me about a competition hosted by the Ballard Center.
A few friends and I registered to be a part of the Social Venture Maternal Health Challenge. The challenge was to solve a maternal health issue in a developing community using a technology-based solution. My team members and I threw ourselves into the project and built an application that tracks prenatal health factors for women living in rural Mozambique. Our team met certain competition criteria and benchmarks and was funded to go in-country to implement the solution that we had developed. We have continued to collect data in the communities that we visited through our application and have registered and tracked visits with over 50 expecting mothers this year alone.
My time in Mozambique was life-changing. Being able to witness firsthand the blending of my two passions, business and healthcare, has filled me with a greater sense of direction and purpose. Since returning from Mozambique, our team has continued to grow and evolve. Our organization, HealthLink Cooperative, is now a registered non-profit dedicated to providing access to quality healthcare for individuals living in underserved communities throughout the world. In addition to filing for non-profit status, we have continued to compete in, and win various competitions including taking first place in the IT category at the University of Utah Bench to Bedside Competition this spring. We now have partners with organizations in multiple sub-Saharan Africa countries including Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, and Madagascar. I have had the privilege to serve as president of HealthLink Cooperative for just over a year now and have grown immensely because of this opportunity. The Ballard Center has given me a chance to take my passions in business and medicine and blend them into something that is making a real difference in the lives of the individuals we work with.