Trent Hall: Where Hunger and Gladness Meet

Ryan Parker is a second-year student in the Master of Science in Global Health program at the Duke Global Health Institute.

Trent Hall is far from the most beautiful building on campus. It’s an old dormitory building with long corridors, bathrooms that still have the old shower stalls, and office spaces converted from single and double dorm rooms. The main classroom, Trent 040, is stuck in the basement with weird pillars running throughout. There’s limited study space, and, aside from the free coffee on the first floor, hardly any food or drink nearby. 

Still, I choose to spend most of my time at Trent because nowhere else do I find as strong a sense of vocation from everyone in the building. 

One of my favorite quotes comes from 20th century theologian Frederick Buechner, who wrote that “the place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”. Trent Hall is a building full of people learning and working to address some of the world’s deepest hungers.

Every day I walk by the office of the GEMINI (Global Emergency Medicine Innovation and Implementation Research) Center, where they are researching ways to scale-up global surgery and improve emergency health systems across the globe. I study in the Student Resource room by professors from the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health, who just collaborated on a plan to cut the probability of premature death in half by 2050. I go to talks and conferences hosted by the Center for Global Mental Health, where researchers are expanding community-based interventions for challenges such as intimate partner violence and suicidal ideation. Everywhere I turn, people are working to ease the hunger for health felt throughout the world.

At Trent, people work hard, and work with their hearts. It’s a building full of deep joy and gladness, which overflows into a powerful feeling of community. Whether it’s just chatting over coffee, going to dinner at professors’ homes over holiday breaks, or traveling to fieldwork together, the community at DGHI is unmatched. My favorite times of day are the 25-minute periods in between classes when the breakrooms and hallways are full of friendly voices and greetings.

This deep gladness also extends to our research. A couple of weeks ago, we had the annual Student Research Showcase, where global health students at all levels present their work. It was such a blessing to be able to go and hear about the research of my peers. More than anything else, what struck me was just how excited everyone was about the work that they were doing. Although putting together a poster presentation can be stressful, none of that stress showed itself at the showcase. I could only sense the palpable passion for global health from everyone in the room.

Aside from the showcase, another one of my favorite days of the year is the ‘Culture Day’ pot-luck, when people across the building bring food representing their background and we all break bread together. DGHI is a globally diverse community with professors from all over the world and students from more than a dozen countries, and the food certainly reflects that diversity. It is a joyful time that celebrates our diversity in culture, experience, and perspectives, but also our unity and shared community, everything that I love about DGHI.

Hunger and gladness meet at Trent Hall. We all recognize the pressing hungers of the world around us—health inequities, social injustice and environmental degradation, to name a few—but at the same time, we are glad to be working together, glad to be where we are, and glad to be doing what we are doing. Though we come from different places, have different motivations, study different topics, use different research methods, and work in different settings, we are all working towards the same goal of health equity. It is this ‘unity in diversity’ that I think characterizes the global health field at its best, and it is why I am excited to continue working in this incredible community.