Rebecca Bertin, MD
Summer greetings from LAAFP!
Summer is a great time for story making – family vacations, special events, and longer days give us the time and space to create memories that will become stories we tell for years to come. In medicine, especially for those of us involved in medical education and training, it is also a time of rapid growth and learning as trainees and recent grads take on new roles and their stories unfold.
Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to travel to Malawi to provide medical care in some villages outside of the capital city of Lilongwe, as well as explore the beautiful “warm heart of Africa.” In the clinics there, in order to provide the care that was needed, I had to learn a new story – Malungo (malaria). As people told me about their mutu (headache) or chifuwa (cough), I had to remember that, even though it was the dry season, about 15% of the people we saw would end up needing treatment for malaria, and keep that at the top of my differential. At first, working in a clinic in Malawi felt like a completely different world than I live in here in Los Angeles. Over the course of the two weeks there, though, I started to see all of the similarities instead of the differences. Many of my patients here struggle with poverty, physical effects of working in physically demanding jobs, and low health literacy in strikingly similar ways to the patients I saw in Malawi. Despite the language barrier, it didn’t take long to feel welcomed into the community in Malawi as people brought small gifts of food or invited us to visit their homes. On our first day in the village, a group of kids surrounded us and taught us a song and dance, and asked us to take their photos; we were struck by how similar kids are everywhere regardless of geography, language, or culture. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have heard the stories of people I met in Malawi, and the stories I now get to tell about my experience there.
I hope you are enjoying the summer and creating stories to tell! If you have stories about being a family physician you’d like to share, remember to keep contributing to CAFP’s 70th anniversary celebration and #MyFMstory here: http://www.familydocs.org/cafp70
