Andrew's closing reflections

I think it’s going to be hard going back home (even though I’m not flying home for another month).  It’s going to be hard to explain to people what I’ve seen here because it’s unlike anyplace in the world.  

These are only a few things of what I’m going to miss:

• ·      Waking up to table mountain every day
• ·      Having the amazing group of co-educators and professors to be inspired by, learn from, and always bounce ideas off of to help me become a better person
• ·      Always feeling challenged about our ways back home
• ·      Seeing people with so little giving so much—it strikes me somewhere deep down in my heart
• ·      Seeing how generations of people are recovering and transforming from very trying years

Andrew (in green) with some of his co-educators

Over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with Professor Rode in the burns unit.  He has been a great inspiration to me.  The most important thing that I learned from him is that I need to back up what I preach.  He told me that there are a few professors who have been touting the need to give patients (mostly the poor black and colored people) access to quality health care, predominantly in the form of the National Health Insurance.  However, when he asked them to come to Khayelitsha to work with him at the clinic he goes to, they always made up some type of excuse.  I want to be involved in health policy to make sure that people can get the best care and Prof set the best example for me because I know that I will never let myself not take real action—I must be “in the trenches”—with whatever I do.  Another one of Prof Rode’s greatest pieces of advice is that I have to be happy with the life decisions I make and make the best of it and don’t plan too far ahead in the future.  He told me this when I asked him how I really want to live in back here in Cape Town for a longer time (at least about a year) and I told him how the next time I can come back is most likely after medical school, but by that time I will be too much in debt and I’ll probably have a family that I’ll have to worry about.   What he said struck home because I can’t plan my life so far in advance that I’m too worried about it…I just have to live and decide what I want to do and then deal with the what life brings (in terms of financial and family situations).