Science & Health Science Abroad

One can be a prolific reader of literature regarding healthcare disparities in developing countries, but once one touches this firsthand they can be profoundly moved. When confronted with a five-year-old villager whose teeth are so filled with cavities that he can barely eat, one cannot help but be moved, moved nearly to tears.

I recently returned from 10 weeks in Senegal, Africa with the U of M’s Student Project for Amity among Nations (SPAN). SPAN is an international research program where you accompany a faculty member and fellow students to a foreign country to carry out an in-depth research project of your choice. I am currently a 5th year CBS student and am on track to matriculate into dental school in 2007.

In Senegal, I carried out two research projects on oral health care: one was a comparison of modern and traditional dentistry and the other was a project entitled “Access to Oral Health Care in Two Senegalese Communities.� The premise of the former is obvious and the latter was intended to determine what barriers stood in the way of Senegalese receiving oral health care. One could say that responses to this inquiry are obvious and may include: lack of money, distance, or belief systems. However, too many studies are based on conclusions that are arrived at without substantial data to back them up. The goal of my study was to collect these data in order to arrive at an informed response to this question.

I consider my two projects to have been very successful. The comparison project was incredible because of the connections that I made throughout Senegal. The dental community there is rather small because the only dental school in Senegal is located in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. I would go to a new hospital to interview a dentist and would see another dentist that I had already met at the university or another hospital. I also had the opportunity to attend a conference (in full bubu [the woman’s traditional Senegalese dress]) for the Senegalese female dentists where the keynote speaker spoke on the tattooing of gums, which was coincidentally a focus of my research. Additionally, because of these connections, the opportunity is available to me to participate in an externship during dental school in Senegal.
For my second project I ended up interviewing a total of 56 total participants in my rural and urban communities. I was very pleased with this total as there were limitations imposed by lack of time and manpower. The most important thing that I learned was how to deliver questions and respond to participant responses. If someone were talking to me about something that I already was familiar with I would never stop him or her because I realized how much people like to give their input and share their knowledge. I found this to be especially true in the village. There had never been anything like this before and the whole process was quite novel for many of the villagers. Most everyone was very eager to participate in the study and share his or her experiences.

Another aspect that I sometimes struggled with was the necessity to remain impartial and nonjudgmental in noting people’s responses to questions. In general, people were not educated about oral health care and I would often interview people who held misconceptions about their oral health care and I struggled with whether or not to take the opportunity to educate. I also pondered a really interesting, but untested variable: the potential effect of me being a white, American interviewer, on the responses of my participants. In the village my translator would often inform me of people’s responses in the village and his belief that they were not telling the truth about questions, especially in regards to questions about tooth-brushing practices. I think that I learned more in my short time in Senegal than I will ever be cognizant of and I continually process my experiences there.

I made many valuable relationships in the dental community in Senegal and I hope that I can continue to do what I can to assist them to improve the state of their oral health care.

For more information on SPAN www.spanalumni.org

I had the opportunity to work on some research in Senegal in West Africa over the summer of 2006. I spent much of my time in Dakar, the capital city, but I also got to travel to some other parts of the country during my nine week stay. I was investigating public health services available to people living with HIV/AIDS and I was working with associations of people living with AIDS. It was a really interesting experience and I definitely appreciated the opportunity to practice my French while learning Wolof. I was a student with the SPAN (Students Proposing Amity Among Nations) program, which allows students to work on individual research projects with a professor abroad. This was a really great way to travel, expand my horizons, work with a rad professor, and try delicious new food and of course, it comes highly recommended.