July 7 – 13: A week of orientation and training in Boston, which alternated between exhilarating and anxiety-producing. The Seed Global Health staff made sure that we were kept busy and well-fed. We had lots of time to learn from, and ask questions of, educators who had been in the Global Health Services Corps (GHSC) before us. The GHSC had previously been a partner to Seed Global Heath, but now Seed Global Health was sending educators on its own, so much about my work in the year ahead is uncertain.

At this point you may be wondering about Seed Global Health, the organization for which I am working, and this gives me a chance to show that I was paying attention during the orientation lectures:

The Seed Global Health vision: Seed believes in a future in which every country has a robust health workforce that is able to meet the health needs of its population.

The Seed Global Health mission: Seed educates a rising generation of health professionals to strengthen access to quality care with a goal of saving lives and improving health.

During the week, we had dinners and informal get togethers after our all-day sessions to get to know our fellow educators, as well as the Seed staff and the lecturers. When I did get some time off, I took full advantage of the centralized location of our hotel and summer’s late nightfall to play Boston tourist.

A group of film makers from the Takeda pharmaceutical company in Tokyo were also at our orientation, documenting it all. Takeda is a supporter of Seed Global Health organization and so they were allowed to film our orientation sessions and interview us. Vanity makes us now very curious to see the final cut. I became friends with Yuko Furukawa from Takeda, who promised to come see me in Blantyre, along with the rest of the crew, when they visit Malawi in October. (Shameless plug: if you come to visit, I will feature you, too!)

Saturday morning at 3:45, we left our hotel for the Boston airport, to check in for our 26-hour-long trip to Lilongwe, Malawi. We were bleary-eyed but excited and looking forward to the rest of our story.

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