BTB undergrads chronicle experiences in Africa

BTB undergrads chronicle experiences in Africa
Blogs reveal life-changing nature of Lesotho internships

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

One thing is clear from the online journals of Rice undergraduates working this summer in Lesotho: Their short stay in Africa is forever changing them.

“I think more and more now that I will come back home from this trip learning more from my (African) students than I have taught them,” wrote Neha Kamat on July 6. Kamat earned her bioengineering degree shortly before leaving for the southern African nation in June.

	COURTESY PHOTO
	Working in pairs, the interns take on projects for local sponsors, and they also evaluate medical devices and implement school curricula developed by themselves and other students who are part of Rice’s global health initiative, Beyond Traditional Borders.

She and the dozen other Rice students in Lesotho are part of Rice’s global health initiative, Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB). On a typical day, BTB interns can be found teaching in local schools, working in AIDS clinics, volunteering at orphanages and consulting with village leaders. Working in pairs, the interns take on projects for local sponsors and they also evaluate medical devices and implement school curricula developed by themselves and other BTB students during the previous year in BTB’s global health technologies course.

For example, Kamat and Will Rice freshman Josh Ozer are working together to start a microenterprise club in Masianokeng High School. BTB secured the donation of 150 solar-powered flashlights that club members are selling to raise working capital. At the end of the five-week course, students will have developed individual business plans and can apply for microfinance loans through the club.

Friday, July 4, Kamat met with the girls in her class to discuss the importance of financial independence.

“I told them that having their own money, regardless of how much they love their partner or how safe they feel at the moment, is essential. We talked about how having your own source of money keeps you in control of your body. We talked about how contributing financially to your own life gives you strength.”

Seeking to draw the girls into the discussion, Kamat told about her own family and how her father immigrated to the United States with only a suitcase. One by one, the girls began telling their own stories.

“Every story began with a family being whole in one year and then quickly losing a member or more to sickness or to the South African mines,” Kamat wrote. “Out of the 15 girls that sat around me, only two had fathers that were actively in their lives, and only around five still lived with their mothers.”

Many of the Lesotho interns are demonstrating and implementing medical prototypes that Rice students created in engineering design courses last year. One device is a battery-powered monitor that prevents children from receiving an overdose of intravenous fluids. Another measures AIDS drugs to help quickly determine whether patients are sticking to their strict antiretroviral drug regimens. A third device is the “Lab-in-a-Backpack,” a portable medical diagnostic kit that contains basic supplies, a battery-powered microscope and a solar-powered battery charger.

“It’s amazing to see all that the interns have accomplished in such a short time,” BTB founder Rebecca Richards-Kortum said in a July 9 e-mail from Lesotho. Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and director of the global health initiative Rice 360