Sara LeGrand is one of the DGHI faculty members leading the project.
Published May 9, 2014, last updated on October 5, 2017 under Voices of DGHI
By Emma Zhao
Student in 2013-14 Bass Connections in Global Health project: Juntos - A Digital Intervention
At 7:30am on Thursday of finals week, I woke to a blaring alarm - not for a frantic last-minute study session, but for a 4 hour "team building workshop" with my Bass Connections group. It had sounded like a great idea when we planned it. But at 7:30, when the rest of Duke is asleep and resting up for finals, that 4 foot jump from the soft blankets of my bed sounds like a lot to ask. Somehow I managed to haul myself to the bus stop to meet the rest of our team, before driving to pick up our partners at El Centro Hispano and heading off to Bahama.
The workshop at once struck me like a middle school field trip. We played blindfolded dodgeball, balanced 9 people on a seesaw and pieced together pictures using only verbal descriptions. The last challenge: with one team member standing on the bar of an A-frame (the triangular frame on the side of swing sets), and four ropes attached to the tip of the A, move the whole thing across the yard, around a flag and back. Wondering how on earth it's possible? I'll leave that to you to figure out.
The point is, even we had trouble with these middle school activities. Take for example the words 'left' and 'right' - they sound pretty straightforward. But with my first dodgeball partner, 'left' meant rotating left until he said stop; my second partner wanted me to actually STEP left. She kept shouting "No, left! Go LEFT!" as I spun around in circles. You would think a Duke college student should be able to figure this out. But only after we lost did I realize that our rules of engagement - just the meaning for the word 'left' - had been completely different. Now this was a simple game of dodgeball; apply this to global health. How can we design an intervention in collaboration with someone whose entire language and culture differ from ours (I don't speak Spanish, I am not Latino and personally do not identify as a sexual minority), if we don't communicate these rules of engagement? How can we succeed if we fixate on the noise of everyone else (like the research of every other global health team working on a similar project) but don't focus on the voice of our partner (for us, members of Durham's Latino community, to whom this intervention is supposed to be tailored)?
In Global health, community partnership is a big issue. Too often researchers from international non-profits or universities fail to "help" target communities, because they don't take time to understand the community or its needs. It's hard to design an intervention to improve someone's health if you've never looked them in the eye and held a conversation. The point of this workshop was for us to bond with each other as friends and team members - to have fun , and create an environment that's conducive for honest feedback and collaboration.
But I'd like to conclude with our hardest challenge of the day: the A-frame. I admit this was the first time I've ever felt truly frustrated with our team (over the entire course of our work together in Bass Connections, not just this team building day). We were uncoordinated, pulling in opposite directions so our efforts canceled out, getting distracted during our respective turns. Our guide even reprimanded us (gently) for not agreeing on a strategy at the beginning. But it was still my favorite challenge. Why? The whole time, we made fun of each other's mistakes. A great team is not one that does everything right the first time - that team doesn't exist - but one that makes tons of mistakes on the path to a solution, and laughs about it afterward. That's the team for whom you'll do extra research, stay up late to send emails, volunteer your free time, and wake up at 7:30am on finals week - because you know that even if you make mistakes, you'll be doing it with great company.
