Naa-Djama Attoh Okine
Health Development Initiative
Kigali, Rwanda
Hello Everyone!
This summer, I spent approximately eleven weeks interning at Health Development Initiative in Kigali, Rwanda, then spent an additional two and a half weeks traveling across Europe before settling back in New York in preparation of the fall semester.
Today, I will be chronicling the sixth through eighth weeks of my tenure as a community health in key populations intern, which included a weekend trip to Lake Kivu and editing a training manual for sex workers.
The traditional work hours of 8 to 5, Monday through Friday, were saturated with continued editing of the manual. A significant amount of data and inspiration for the manual came from similar works by the East African Sexual Health and Rights Initiative and the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation.
By week six, I had met up with a few human rights officers to organize a comprehensive table of contents, had created a pre-assessment sensitivity training quiz for community health workers and HDI staff, and had completed the sections on HIV statistics, family planning, and safer sex.
The meeting was especially insightful, as I came face-to-face with some common issues in the NGO field. In creating a health and human rights journal regarding the welfare of a marginalized and criminalized population, I had to tread carefully in how the language of the manual depicted the government. Entire sections had to be reworked (or in more extreme situations, scrapped) during the editing process. I will go into specifics in a future post. These types of issues have taught me myriad priceless lessons as I proceed through my education.
During my seventh weekend in Kigali, a colleague and I took a weekend trip to Lake Kivu. While the four-hour journey across innumerable unpaved roads and hills should have spelled disaster, the beauty of the landscape, people, and buildings made for a welcome distraction.
While photos may be worth a thousand words, an entire volume could not describe the experience of standing in such a natural wonder!
The Monday of my eighth week in Kigali saw both progress with the training manual (which I will talk about in my next and final blog post) and an artistic exploration of textiles at the Kimironko Market, which was bursting to the seams with a variety of vendors. I found myself enchanted by both the physical and social interactions taking place.
To be continued!
