Over the summer, while many Lambert students stayed at home to relax and enjoy the much needed break from the stress of school, junior Roma Shringarpure spent her summer in the rural city of Mombasa, Kenya. For four weeks she worked at the Coast General Hospital, the second largest hospital in Mombasa, shadowing foreign doctors along with a third-party organization.
Before leaving for Kenya, Shringarpure raised 400 dollars and brought school supplies for children in the town of Nyali. She interned near the village, where she spent over five hours everyday at the hospital. Every week she worked a different shift in a new area such as internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics and radiology. She also worked at a women’s or children’s health clinic every Wednesday. On Fridays, the interns learned new skills such as inserting IVs and watching a heartbeat monitor.
Shringarpure has been in the healthcare field since sixth grade when she joined Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA), and became truly interested in eighth grade when she took Ms. Shelly Birch’s Healthcare class. To her, all aspects of the healthcare field are a new opportunity to learn.
“ Everything about it [healthcare] really interests me, because all the different diseases and ways to cure it and save someone’s life, is just something I want to be a part of,” she said.
In her time there, she was able to witness many impactful events like the birth of a child and the death of an elder. On her first day, Shringarpure witnessed the death of a patient from a heart attack. However, in her time there she also got to see wonderful things, such as the creation of life. She assisted in delivering 15 live babies in the hospital.
While working in a foreign country, Shringarpure was exposed to many things not commonly seen in the United States. She went to Mombasa during a time of heavy political unrest including numerous protests against the government, which resulted in many of the patients coming in suffering gunshots and brutal wounds from the protests. The protests were against a controversial financial bill proposed by President William Ruto. In the United States, most protests are fairly peaceful and civilized, but in Kenya weaponry violence was used, resulting in multiple deaths. “If that stuff happened [the protests] here it would have been controlled in under a second, but in Kenya there was open fire and machetes,” she said.
While it was a shocking incident to witness, it provided Shringarpure and her fellow interns a new perspective on the medical field.
Shringarpure learned so much during her time in Kenya, and enjoyed the friends and memories she made there. She is an outstanding student with a passion for learning and serving the healthcare community. Aside from the medical field, Shringarpure is also a sprinter for Track and Field. She does lots of medical volunteering, works on the youth board for the Red Cross, and serves as a lieutenant at Lambert HOSA. As Shringarpure continues to excel in the field of medicine, she is sure to achieve great things and change lives for the better.
