Long story short, we are here to work.  Sure we’ll hit up Zanzibar, a safari, and maybe climb a mountain, but we signed up with GHSP to use our medical training to teach in Tanzania.

But we aren’t teachers!  This is something that is easier to forget than one might think and it has certainly given us pause on a number of occasions as we prepared for this experience.  It turns out that few in medical and nursing education have any formal education in how to teach.  Rather, we tend to teach the way we’ve learned.

And that is where this program comes in.  Olivia and I will be embedded as medical and nursing faculty at a local university here.  Our goal is to help the local faculty fill the teaching gaps and bring our own experience as teachers and learners to the table.

The week before we left for California we spent three days with our “counterparts”.  These are the Tanzanian faculty who have been chosen by their deans to be our partners.  Together we discussed our specific roles on faculty, the academic calendar, and specific interests we share in common.  It was fun to begin to develop a picture of what day to day life will look like.

I’ll be teaching in the internal medicine department and may switch halfway through the year to teach in the pediatrics department.  Another physician volunteer, who is also a family medicine physician, will do the opposite, with us switching places between semesters.  Tanzania doesn’t have robust family medicine—the first residents to graduate in this specialty did so in recent years and the Ministry of Health is still deciding where these physicians best fit in the health system here.  Part of our role will be to lead by example and show that physicians can care for both adults and children, and do so at a high level.

On any given day I’ll be lecturing, providing clinical instruction at a nearby government hospital, and mentoring students.  My counterpart is a young internal medicine physician and I’m excited to work collaboratively with him.  He was mentored by the GHSP volunteer who I’m replacing and I’ve heard rave reviews about his commitment to teaching and to students.

Olivia will be doing much the same in the nursing school: lecturing, helping student nurses deliver babies, and promoting the rights of women to a humane birth experience wherever and whenever she can.

One thing we’ve heard about medical education in Tanzania, and resource-limited settings in general, is that faculty shortages are the norm.  Physicians are not well reimbursed for their teaching duties and so must staff private clinics to make ends meet for their families.  As a natural byproduct, students don’t get the kind of attention we’re used to in our medical education system.

So this is where we fit in.  I am in Tanzania to teach.  My job is to build capacity by focusing on developing high quality, competent, and most importantly compassionate physicians.  We’ve been told time and time again that the students possess these attributes in spades.  I’m excited to help nurture and reinforce them.

I am confident many of my students will be leaders in the Tanzanian health care system someday.  I know my counterpart will be.  By giving the gift of my time and by sharing a few things I’ve picked up along the way as a student and resident myself, I get to participate in this leadership development.

We’ll write more throughout the year about what we do day to day.  But right now I’m just living into this fun and exciting reality that most of what I will do is be present, engage the hearts and minds of those I will work alongside, and together we’ll see what we can do.