New Beginnings

During my semester abroad in Ecuador, I kept a detailed blog of my travels. I posted pictures, wrote descriptive captions, and tried as best as I could to share my experience with those back home who I knew were reading: my family, my closest friends, and a few others who would occasionally peek in to keep tabs on me. As that blog shows, when I studied abroad in Ecuador, my goals were clear: to seek adventure. I wanted to climb mountains and eat strange foods. I strove to challenge myself by diving into an unknown culture and a foreign language. I sought emotional, intellectual, and cultural growth simply by experiencing, by learning, and by absorbing all that I could. I even tried to give back now and then, either by participating in service activities or simply by talking about what it's like in the US, making my trip to Ecuador a cultural exchange of sorts. But all in all, it was an adventure, one that I enjoyed deeply and will forever remember with great fondness. Some of those memories are recorded in my blog, which is essentially a list of my exciting discoveries during those few months back in the fall of 2006.

As I prepared to return to Ecuador for the next ten months, I struggled to find my motivation for coming back. Yes, I won a prestigious Fulbright grant, ooh la la. But that could never be a true impetus for me to devote myself to such a long period of time so far away from those I know and love. Also, I felt like that impulsive feeling of "I'm just gonna go and see what happens!" would not suffice this time around, because I have already found that sort of adventure in Ecuador. There's no doubt that I will continue to encounter exciting situations, and I still enjoy eating adventurously and climbing mountains, but again, I feel like I need a real reason to be here.

The main difference between my semester abroad and my upcoming year is that this time, I have come with a specific project in mind. Perhaps it's the result of my spending the last two months writing dozens of medical school application essays about my career ambitions, but I think that this year in Ecuador is a time for me to pursue some of the academic topics that I find most interesting. As I have stated repeatedly in those essays, "In college, I conducted independent study projects on bioethics, medical anthropology, and health policy, which introduced me to many ethical, cultural, and social factors in health care." This public health research project will give me the opportunity to engage in these fields firsthand. This work is hard, though. It involves interviews with politicians, health care providers, and hopefully the patients themselves. It will require an analysis of resource allocation and health outcomes, both of which I do not yet know how we will conduct. And it will all be in Ecuador, in Spanish, in a system that I do not fully understand that is meant to provide health care to an extremely diverse and poor population. From what I understand, public health seems to be one of those fields where people work too hard and bureaucracy keeps them from accomplishing as much as they should. (Thankfully, I will have my future-public-interest-lawyer brother and sister-in-law at my side in this noble struggle.) So I'm sure that this work will exhaust me, but at least I know that one of my motivations is academic.

That's about all that I've settled on so far. I do love Ecuador, and I am happy to be back here. The food is wonderful and cheap, the streets are alive with commotion, and people are so kind and hospitable. And I will try to take the advice of some of my friends who tell me to chill out a bit, since this is my last year to relax before I enter the gauntlet of my medical education. But leaving home was one of the harder things I've ever done, because I'm leaving a lot of dear friends and loved ones behind. While I intend to stay as connected as possible with all of you, it was a difficult choice nonetheless. And so I want to be sure to have a reason to be here. One is to pursue my academic interests. Another is to enjoy myself in this place that I love. I'm sure more will sprout up as time moves along. So rather than a list of events, this blog is likely to be a place for me to share my thoughts, my feelings, and my process of figuring out just why I'm here. Don't worry though, I'll be sure to include at least a couple images of me eating the skin off of a guinea pig.