While most students spent their summer catching up on sleep or hanging out with friends, Lambert High School senior Zoya Batra spent a week at Georgetown University taking part in the Advanced Medical Public Health Internship. The program gave her the chance to enhance her medical skills and work with doctors and patients in Nigeria through telehealth.
Lambert HOSA State Conference is how Batra first heard about the internship from the leader Marshall Bailey’s speech. Through the internship, she worked to help communities in Bauchi, Nigeria and make a difference for kids who otherwise wouldn’t have access to respiratory treatments.
“What really caught my eye was that we got to actually be on call with a little kid from Nigeria and diagnose him,” Batra said. “The program would fund his treatment, which he wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.”
Working with doctors in Nigeria was very different from what she had seen in Georgia. At first there were challenges with WiFI, but Batra said it was still “an incredible experience” to see what they knew compared to doctors in the United States.
“They don’t always have access to the newest research like doctors in the United States do,” Batra explained. “It made me really grateful for the opportunities and resources we have.”
Her group was assigned acute respiratory infections, which are a really big health concern in Nigeria, and they worked to create a health campaign to help those people.
“We made pamphlets and a video about our respiratory treatment campaign, but we had to make it really easy for them to read,” Batra explained. “We used some Hausa, which is the language they speak, and added natural remedies since some people don’t really believe in medicine.”
After a long week of 14 hour days, their project was eventually approved by doctors at Georgetown and in Nigeria to be used in real communities.
Besides the group work on their campaign , Batra also got hands-on medical practice. She learned phlebotomy on a model arm, tried out laparoscopy with surgical tools and even practiced doing ultrasounds.
“The hardest part was ultrasounding the heart,” Batra shared. “It was easier to ultrasound the stomach, but the lungs blocked the heart so it was hard to see.”
Batra also encourages more students to pursue the same opportunity and to take part in similar programs in order to expand both their medical knowledge as well as helping others who do not have the same opportunities as we do.
“If anyone has the opportunity to travel abroad or work with people from other countries, they should,” Batra shared. “It makes you more grateful for what you have and shows how much of a difference you can make for other people.”
