GEMx Blog

Growing as an Individual

December 18, 2018

Filed under: GEMx Regional Exchanges, GEMx Student Reflections

Post by Rumbidzai Mupfuti, MBChB student at the University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences taking an elective exchange to University of Kwazulu-Natal School of Nursing and Public Health.

My name is Rumbidzai Mupfuti, I’m a 23-year-old lady, currently in my final year doing MBChB at the University of Zimbabwe. Like most people, during my 4th year, I was super excited about participating in an elective but to be honest my excitement was mostly to do with the hype of getting to leave the country and going for a tourist adventure. At my medical school, we always had elective day sometime in April and medical students would share their different destinations and their encounters. When I started my 4th year, I had all sorts of plans to go do my elective overseas because I had always dreamt of doing my elective in a first world country. Finally, it was my turn to have an amazing experience I’d always thought about.

In January of 2017, I started applying to many universities abroad and talked to my predecessors on how I could approach. I had already made all my budgets for the various destinations I hoped for and had started looking for sponsorships. With all the enthusiasm I had, sadly it was now June and still, I was far away from landing any of my dream destinations.

It was just one day, as I was strolling with a friend and she mentioned GEMx…to be honest I had just heard of it briefly, as our faculty office was encouraging people to apply but I never put it to mind since I didn’t have much knowledge about it. So my friend, Tinashe, shared a little bit more about GEMx and I remember going home that day with so many questions about, why I wanted to go for an elective and what my expectations were in relation with my future goals within the medical fraternity.

GEMx was a fairly new thing at my medical school; it had been running for a few years. However, going through the GEMx website I realized how this experience would make me grow as an individual and give me an opportunity to learn more about the health care in surrounding nations, and there was no better time than NOW!

Looking back, I’m grateful I had that conversation because it gave me a different view and bigger picture towards elective attachment. It was as if I had a whole new view…..yes my dream was to do my elective overseas but I still failed to answer the why and how it would help me as a health practitioner and my goal. I realized that I’m very passionate about Global Health particularly in Africa as a whole…. so to cut the long story short, my heart was here, home in Africa.

So given the few months that were left I pursued my GEMx application, and fortunately I was selected as part of the 3 students from my medical school. I was excited and expectant to be visiting our neighbors, South Africa in the beautiful city of Durban.

Travel

We traveled from Harare to Durban by air.  It was a fairly short journey approximately 4 hours and connected in Johannesburg. Upon our arrival in Durban, it was one of the best experiences. If I was asked to describe Durban in a few words I would say, “CULTURAL EXPLOSION!!!” A place which is multi-racial with so much energy and a warm breeze climate. We were welcomed with love, with a lovely lady, Viv who we stayed with for the whole 4 weeks in the lovely neighborhood of Wentworth. With all the love she showed us, this became a second home for us.

Rue with her friends

Hospital Experience

We were nervous about our first day of elective at Wentworth Hospital. All sorts of questions were running through our heads: where we would fit in or even adjust? I remember our first day, we got lost initially but eventually found our way and we were welcomed by our coordinator, Dr. Naidoo. He was the head of Family Medicine at the hospital and he guided us through step by step concerning our 4 weeks attachment in Family Medicine where we got to rotate through Accident and Emergency, Medical ward, Chronic and Acute OPD and the HIV clinic. We had such an amazing team at Wentworth Hospital, from the doctors, nurses, and staff. They treated us like fellow colleagues.

As I said earlier, Durban is a multiracial city and served as an educational time. It was great meeting and learning from different people’s clinical experience and the fact that despite the different backgrounds they all worked as one unit towards providing the best medical care they could give to their community. This gave me a whole different view, as I noticed that we share the same disease burden i.e HIV and its associated infections and non-communicable diseases. This made me appreciate and understand that the different disease burdens and health resource challenges we encounter in my nation go beyond our borders and the first is ours together and through interactions like these and even at a bigger scale can help stop the fight against the various disease burdens in Africa. I also noted a lot of similarities in the health protocols and the differences motivated me and gave me ideas that maybe one day would love to see being implemented back in my home country.

During our 4 week attachment, we got an opportunity to do a Quality Improvement Project on Primary prevention of chronic illnesses. I got to appreciate the importance of teamwork, as it gave us an opportunity to interact with different staff of the hospital and patients giving us insight on the importance of both health practitioners and patients in our efforts as a whole continent to improve our health in Africa as a whole. Lastly, we got an opportunity to visit a government tertiary(specialist) hospital in Durban, Albert Nkosi Hospital. It was an unforgettable experience, I appreciated how people were able to access specialist care equally regardless of different economic background. This moved me, and I thought this was a positive step towards achieving Global Health Access to Africa as a whole. I can go on and on but words can never fully describe how this experience changed my view towards health and motivation towards my career goals…Not forgetting the fun bit of Durban in conclusion, we couldn’t have missed that too

Out and About

So Durban is a tourist city with so much more to show. I can say we got a glimpse of so much great stuff there is to see in Durban…the “CULTURAL EXPLOSION” makes Durban a city full of life and love!!! We got an opportunity to tour around the city Centre and got to know a bit of history about how the city came about. Not forgetting the amazing experience at Ushaka Marine World, we got an opportunity to see one of the largest aquarium, had dolphin shows and a whole lot of activities. we also toured to Moses Madhiba Stadium were also got a glimpse of the huge stadium. We also to see a glimpse of the huge malls, the Pavilion and Gateway Malls and last but not least, because of the vast Indian Ocean, we had unlimited opportunities to swim through the warm ocean currents.

Dolphin show

Rumbidzai, Zimbabwe