From AIDS to Zulu is an ambitious title, but then again, the adventure is fairly ambitious, too. A to Z indicates a sort of comprehensiveness that I really don’t forsee achieving, but perhaps it also alludes to an overview, something I hope that will happen.
We’ll begin with AIDS because that is why the NIH is in this area and it’s why I’ll be there, too. I will be leaving in a month to spend one year at an NIH research site in South Africa, as a Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholar (http://www.aamc.org/students/medstudents/overseasfellowship/). I’ll be living in a town outside Durban called Pietermaritzburg (PMB) and working in a town outside of there called Vulindlela. Think of Durban like Omaha, PMB like Lincoln and Vulindlela like Palmyra, NE. The are all located on the eastern coast of South Africa which is itself, as the name implies, in the south of Africa. It’s this location that gives us the Zulu. This area is the tribal homeland of the Zulu tribe and the state is called KwaZulu-Natal.
It remains to be seen exactly what I’ll be doing there, but as an MD/PhD student, I am advised at the med center by Dr. Steven Hinrichs, Dr. Andy Jameton, Dr. Mike Shambaugh-Miller, and Dr. Susan Swindells. I am looking forward to learning GIS, AIDS, health care ethics, and epidemiology. In South Africa, I’ll be working with Dr. Quarraisha Abdool Karim and Dr. Janet Frohlich, and at an organization called CAPRISA — the Center for AIDS Presention Research in South Africa. Check out their website here: http://www.caprisa.org/joomla/
For the next month, however, I’ll be in Bethesda at the NIH headquarters. Further bulletins as events warrant!
