CFHI in Kabale, Uganda

CFHI provides a nice organized introduction into big issues in health care in Uganda and East Africa. If you have any interest in HIV/AIDs, tropical medicine, maternal child health issues, food insecurity and undernutrition, you will learn from this program. Even better, you learn almost exclusively from Ugandans while there. Their vision for health and progress in their country is awe-inspiring and the CFHI program is a wonderful opportunity for students to both participate and contribute as they work on meeting their goals. Healthcare in Africa is extremely complicated, but the doctors and medical workers I learned from in Uganda have cultivated an ability to step back and see the big picture. They helped me to see how interconnected all of the pieces of healthcare are. One patient in particular drove this home for me--we treated a young malnourished child with HIV on an outreach day in a village, then brought her back to town to treat her malnourishment with refeeding and engaged her and her mother in a program to teach them to improve their farming practices and access to food near their home. I was so impressed with the capability of a clinic with minimal resources overall to tackle these gigantic problems in such a holistic way. I hop that after seeing such great examples of program planning and implementation that I will be able to take some of that forward into developing my own clinical practice in the future.