Senegal and the Gambia
Summer 2013

"How great that the medical students may have a chance to participate in this course. I really enjoyed the short time we spent with Dr. Marquez and got so much out of the course. I thought it was well structured as we had to do a lot of reading and writing about the locations we were visiting in advance so we had good familiarity with the objective features of the countries' public health infrastructure before our travels. And once we got there, we could try to correlate what we had read with what we could see on the ground, and what the reality of those objective measures looked and felt like.

"Although our accommodations were very fine and we never lacked for anything, traveling in countries that make do with much less helped to give perspective to the vast relative wealth — of infrastructure and everything else — that we enjoy in the U.S., and further deepened my sense that good solutions for complex social, public health, or really any kind of problem are probably best generated locally where the real on-the-ground reality of a system's assets and issues can best be ascertained and mobilized.

"The course and trip also whet my appetite for global public health. I am so grateful I got to do this during medical school and only wish I could do more."