My seven-month journey through India, Nepal, and Southeast Asia happened serendipitously. Two friends planned the trip and I, twenty-four years old and dreadfully unhappy with my first job as a biochemist, was looking for an escape. They invited and I accepted, not realizing that such an adventure would be one of the most fortunate accidents my career could ever take.
After spending two months traveling through Nepal to India, I decided to part with my compatriots. I was anxious to explore eastern philosophies towards health, and Dharamsala, a small Indian hill town home to the exiled Dalai Lama, seemed a perfect place to do so. I enrolled in an Ayurvedic massage class, and learned about doshas and pressure points. My most memorable lesson, however, did not come in the classroom. It came from a cat.
This particular cat had fallen from the second story window of a crumbling building, landing in the middle of a main footpath through town. It began wailing, unable to move its back legs and desperately trying to scramble around with its front. People stopped to help, but mainly stood helpless. One man tried to put its legs in a cardboard box—a makeshift wheelchair. Another tourist asked if there was a veterinarian in town (there was not). The locals, Indians and Tibetans, stopped briefly, more intrigued with the gathering of tourists than the feline in front of us.
I remember the cat, not only because it reminded me of one of my childhood pets (a tabby named Alice) but because of what a fellow traveler whispered in my ear while everyone sadly stood.
“Look,” he said, “we all stop to try and help the cat, but do nothing for the people.”
I pondered his statement. Then I became a bit miffed. There is nothing a scientist hates more than to have someone come to an obvious conclusion before her.
Dammit, I thought, he’s right.
Every day in town, I had walked by lepers who scooted around on shreds of cardboard, bodies sunken by malaria, and kids with racking respiratory infections. I didn’t stop. Or look for a doctor or clinic. I silently anguished over the first, second, maybe tenth person, but after a while, it was as if cats were falling from windows all the time; I simply became inured to their existence, their hopeless plight downwards.
I sat in my mud hut that night and contemplated the glaring health disparities between developed and developing nations. We had figured out how to eradicate so many diseases—leprosy, dengue, waterborne infections—but our global neighbors were still suffering. The science had worked, but the societies had not.
When I returned to the states, I realized that preventing disease at the population level has a name: public health. I applied for a master’s program at UC Berkeley and got in; my entrance essay discussed the health discrepancies I had seen while traveling.
Years later, on a public health research project in the Guatemalan highlands, I was again struck by poverty and disease. But this time, I was there to help.
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