Savitri on more reevaluations

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Design Expo with my friend and roommate Elise. Cape Town has been elected to be the design capital of the world for 2013, which is really exciting because it means that it will be at the heart of alternative ways of approaching problems like improper sanitation and infrastructure for people living in the townships. There were a lot of cool craft stalls and beautiful art, very pleasing to the eye. There was one stall with funny comics of Cape Town, so I bought a couple of postcards for R5 each.

My favorite part by far though was this little makeshift theatre they had within the Expo. The theatre was part of a large film festival and featured a series of quick videos all having to do with innovative solutions to current problems. Some of my favorite videos included one about a soup kitchen that hires ex-convicts to allow them opportunity to a positive role in society, one about a woman who supported other women victimized by domestic violence by developing a creative outlet through street art, one about stigmas surrounding sanitation and how important it is for all classes of a community to take sanitation seriously (this one is called “Meet Mr. Toilet”).

But my absolute favorite one was called “The Honor Code” that explored the significance of honor in the upkeep and rejection of certain cultural practices. The philosopher behind the topic, Kwame Anthony Appiah, brought up Chinese foot binding and how it was perpetuated by honor and also rejected by shifting the source of that honor (the woman) towards a different source (the man). He suggests that because this shifting of honor succeeded in doing away with a harmful cultural practice it could possibly be used to deal with a more current, incredibly abusive cultural practice called honor killing. Because the honor of the man, whether brother, father, or uncle is placed on the woman who has had sex, her supposed defilement of her own spiritual honor equates with the defilement of her male family member’s honor. This is based off of the belief that while are inherently pure (meaning that if they were to fall in “mud” they could still come out “clean”) women are only conditionally pure (meaning that once they even touch “mud” they are forever “impure”). Such notions of purity are prevalent in many cultures and while they are not inherently malicious, their interpretation and execution in reality has caused many horrible violations of human rights, such as shaming, isolation, and re-victimization of victims of rape. I really enjoyed his theory because I had never thought of approaching this problem by somehow shifting the blame from victim to perpetrator. This is the mantra of Violence against Women Prevention at UConn, but never had I put those two together before.

This movie-watching experience also proved useful in allowing me to reevaluate what it is I am passionate about. I noticed while I was watching these videos that I was not that interested in the videos regarding health clinics and primary care. I felt a greater pull and excitement when I saw the video regarding a recent success in Philadelphia where doctors used inactivated HIV cells to train a young girl’s body to fight its own leukemia. It was awesome. But I felt guilty because I know how important primary care is. Somehow, I feel that I’ve been telling myself that the best way, the right way to be in medicine is to be on as close a level with the patient so as to treat them with the best respect and dignity. I’ve grown to love the idea of helping people through medicine, but I am realizing that it is not medicine with which I am in love. I crave a space for creativity, for talking with people and comparing and contrasting stories, perspectives, groups of thought. Anthropology excites me. Research topics in cancer and infectious diseases excite me. But medicine and clinical health do not excite me.

I have been reluctant to let go of this idea of becoming a doctor because I want so much to prove to myself that I can be both a doctor and a humanitarian. But I don’t know if that path is right for me anymore, I am seeing more and more that I cannot go too long without making something myself, something new and something inspiring to me. The feeling of helplessness while performing the same routine tests, diagnoses, and treatments is something that I recognize is incredibly important and necessary for the well-being of other people. And I feel guilty that I have this option to do something I like rather than something that I have to do. I feel bad that the nurses and staff at Tafelsig would probably choose a better job if one was available, and that I can come and go without any real commitment other than Monday through Wednesday 8 to 4. I have the luxury to go on this program to see what kind of experiences in medicine and health I feel most passionate about, and to go home and feed those passions rather than suppress them. I don’t think this guilt is ever meant to go away. Maybe my version of understanding myself and living within my values is being guilty and happy at the same time.