From the Streets of South America to the Classroom in North Carolina

Ecuador

Published April 12, 2013, last updated on April 9, 2018 under Voices of DGHI

A current student reflects on his path to global health and to Duke University.

By Ben Silverberg, MSc-GH Student

It all started in Ecuador where I spent a year teaching English. Wednesday afternoon in downtown Guayaquil: It’s hot and bustling as usual. Men in business suits and women in two-tone work uniforms are walking back from their lunch hours, filled up on fish ceviche or rice and fried meat or potato yapingachos.  I’m just now going to work myself. I’m trying to blend in with the packs of Latinos; I have on my street face (learned back in Brooklyn), but my blue eyes betray me. And if I were to open my mouth, well, then, all bets are off – my Spanish, at the time, was on-par with a preliterate child. I sigh quietly to myself and keep moving.

Weaving between the street vendors who sell small red apples in large plastic bags, lottery tickets and toothpaste to pedestrians and passengers on passing buses, I stop cold on the corner before my school.  A body is sprawled out in the street, though it’s not garnering much attention from passers-by.  A moment’s hesitation: Is this a homeless man or someone who’s had too much to drink?  No, there’s a pool of blood forming around his head.  No, this is not good.

I lapse into gringo EMT, kick into a sprint – leaving all knowledge of Spanish behind me – and try to explain to the security guard at my school, my hands emphatic, that he needs to call an ambulance.  People have seen me running and now they’re curious.  I return to the body with a small crowd.  As if in a made-for-TV movie, a woman steps forward to help me express myself in Spanish. The bleeding man is becoming conscious again, and he certainly doesn’t like that a comparatively tall white boy is trying to keep him from moving his head and neck.

As I later trudge upstairs to wash my hands and teach class as planned, my adrenaline-induced lucidity is morphing into questions like, “Did I do the right thing intervening?” Tap water is flowing over my hands just the same as when I had returned from other EMS calls in Washington, DC.  I’m still thinking as I watch the water drain in a clockwise direction. “Yes,” I conclude proudly, “but things would have been the same in the US, too.  And that means I’m not really such an extranjero – or foreigner – after all.” Novelist Jack Kerouac would have been proud.

As I carved out my year-long adventure teaching English in Ecuador, I found that some of my most notable experiences happened on the road. Some, like the hit-and-run victim, were closer to the actual pavement than others.

Looking back, my life’s journey has passed me through medical school and residency – and has complemented my work with Spanish-speaking patients and advanced Spanish language fluency.  Whether I could competently converse with my Latino patients – which I almost entirely learned “in the street” through work in Ecuador and Costa Rica – or offer only a handful of words in other languages to my refugee patients from other lands, I saw first-hand the benefits of learning to speak their native tongue.  That year spent in Ecuador was the start of my love affair with all things Latino, and has since shaped my pursuits – including my work this summer.

Before me lies a summer thesis research project in Guatemala to investigate the barriers to surgical care, and in the future I hope to carve out a career mixing a professorship in academia with a focus on primary care medicine and Central and South America.

With lots of passion but little experience in research methods, public policy or economics, I looked to Duke University to teach me what I didn’t know I didn’t know. I chose to pursue the Duke Master of Science in Global Heath because it is one of the only programs of its kind in the nation, and because it had the flexibility to allow me to continue working part time and to pursue a thesis project that reflected my goals of learning. I’m further continuously surprised (pleasantly so) by the opportunities I’ve found here, from truly career-shaping mentorship by senior faculty to lecture series with world-renowned authors. To be sure, Duke University is at the top of its class for a reason.

Having taken me in many directions with lots of different experiences, my path to Duke has been a rewarding one and is preparing me to conquer the world.

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