Adventures of a Med Student in Romania
Erin McCarvill
I think it’s safe to say that I have gained an impressive amount of knowledge since starting medical school at Dalhousie two years ago. I’ve learned a million new big words, how to scribble illegibly, and how to put tubes into the various orifices of the human body. Medical school has also inadvertently taught me how to be a bit of a drama queen (some might argue that I possessed this trait well before starting med school – but that is beside the point).
June 2nd will mark the beginning of my last summer vacation – twelve glorious weeks of freedom before the hospital consumes me and the student life that I know today is but just a memory (*sighs loudly*).
I told you I was a drama queen.
I decided to use my last summer vacation as a great opportunity to do something different – something random but something useful. After countless hours of searching I finally stumbled upon the perfect project! I signed on with Global Volunteers, a St Paul, Minnesota-based nonprofit international development organization. As a member of one of their service teams I am going to spend three weeks caring for orphaned children at the Tutova Failure to Thrive Clinic in the Moldova region of Romania. This program is just one of the short-term service projects that Global Volunteers runs in 20 countries around the world.
Children are brought to the Tutova clinic because they are sick and are not growing properly; without intervention many of them will die. My time in Romania will be spent taking care of these children and helping with the general upkeep of the facilities. The clinic is located adjacent to the local hospital so in addition I hope to spend a bit of time shadowing physicians to get a sense of how their health care system operates.
I hope to document my experiences in Romania using an on-line blog available on Edwards. As long as I have internet access I will be updating the blog as regularly as possible.
After three weeks of volunteering, I will bid the children farewell and make my way south to Cairo where I will spend almost three weeks touring around and enjoying the ancient wonders of Egypt.
Riding camels in Egypt and helping orphaned infants in Romania – it’s hard to get more random than that!
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