Student Profiles

Yevin Roh

KENYA

I journeyed to Kenya in the summer of 2009 with a group of UMass Boston nursing students. Our goal was to educate, diagnose, and screen for cardiovascular and metabolic disease in Kenya's rural residents by holding free, open health screenings in the Kijabe and Tumutumu regions. We also conducted a health survey in a rural Kikuyu village to discern the health habits of the people and their daily living practices.

Hypertension was common, and diabetes less so. Most of the cases of hypertension were correlated with food choices, as the tradtional Kenyan diet is high in red meat, saturated fat, and starch. Due to a strong Christian influence brought by colonization, rates of smoking and premarital sex are low- the latter making Kenya a country with one of the lowest HIV/AIDS rates in Africa.

Common public health issues which existed among the patients we screened were poverty, access to healthcare, corruption among health professionals and government, and infrastructure.

CAMBODIA               

I journeyed to Cambodia in the summer of 2010 with a group of Cambodian American UMass Boston students. Our goal there was to perform a community health needs assessment and then present our findings to the UMass Boston Office of International and Transnational Affairs (OITA). Including our observations, our findings also detailed how students could help with the health of the communities we surveyed. Before our departure we also interviewed Cambodian Americans living in Lowell and Revere Massachusetts to gain a better understanding of the culture and health issues. From our interviews we learned that diarrhea is a common killer and many people perform manual labor to make a living. Thus, we also delivered anti-diarrheal medication and OTC painkillers to the rural villages we visited.

The other team members wrote about how education and social justice issues affected health, while I focused on more broadly on public health issues. We visited schools, clinics, refugees, places of work and open markets to gain a better understanding of the panoply of issues which were affecting Cambodian health.

During our time there, we also immersed ourselves in the Khmer culture to gain a better understanding of the people we were hoping to help. We visited local points of pride (such as Angkor Wat) and points of tragedy (the S-21 Genocide Museum).