Heart to Heart
The ICHA Blog
Dr. Sujatha Sankaran M.D., ICHA’s co-founder, was born in Miami and moved quite a bit as a child. Growing up, she took many trips to India to visit family and established a strong connection to those living in less fortunate circumstances. While in medical school at the University of Southern California, her experiences at the diverse LA County Hospital helped to cement her devotion to working with underserved patients. She worked as a hospitalist at Columbia University after completing her residency at Georgetown University. She joined Medecins Sans Frontieres and volunteered in Africa before settling in San Francisco to practice Internal Medicine.
In her spare time, Sujatha enjoys traveling, writing non-fiction, vegetarian cuisine, and walks with her energetic dog.
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Reflections |
As I reflect about the past couple of weeks and ICHA’s progress during our first outreach, I am inspired, grateful, almost giddy about our success. We have been very fortunate. Health workers, community members, chiefs, local media—everyone has been welcoming and receptive. People in this community seem genuinely engaged and interested, eager to be educated and to educate others about the suffering caused by preventable non-communicable diseases. Everyone has a story—an obese aunt, a hypertensive grandmother, a brother whose leg was amputated due to a diabetic foot ulcer. ICHA’s core values, empowerment through education, the power of prevention, community involvement, have all been at the forefront during this outreach.
But, as I step back from the warmth and affirmation of this amazing community, I realize that we have our work cut out for us. Chronic diseases are not simple illnesses that can be cured with a pill or a pamphlet. Lifestyle interventions involve changing the way people think about their bodies, their lives, the role of health care and the ability to really effect change in their own lives. In the developed world, most people know that tobacco abuse is harmful, that obesity will shorten their lives, that diet and exercise are vital. And yet, the rates of obesity are skyrocketing, and cardiovascular disease is still the number one cause of death in the world.
This is the challenge and promise of ICHA. Our modus operandi is education. We see the power of showing an individual how simple changes in her diet will improve her quality of life tremendously, the effectiveness of teaching a health worker to give inexpensive anti-hypertensive medications to prevent strokes and heart attacks from ever happening, the importance of teaching in the schools, in the churches, and in the community. But while education is vital, we also have to find a way to translate education into action, to incorporate into communities and better understand how people can live more healthy lives.
So, as ICHA takes a moment to breathe and to bask in the affirmation of a very successful outreach in Ghana, we must also take a moment to respect the ambitious nature of what we’re trying to do, and to reflect on the tremendous challenges that lie ahead.
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Four days in |
We’ve been in Ghana for four days now. Needless to say, it feels like we’ve been here for much longer. It’s been an odd sort-of-homecoming for me. I’ve had emotional reunions with dear friends I left behind, and have spent the past couple of days reacquainting myself with the sights, smells, and sounds of this town. The sight of the fishing boats moored in Elmina, the pungent burning smell in the air, the thick warm humidity, the sounds of singing and clapping in the distance…are all strangely comforting in their familiarity. It makes me remember how, when I came back from Ghana last time, I found myself homesick for this place that was only temporarily my home.
As for the clinic, it is the same bundle of contradictions that I remember from three years ago. The patients are very sick, sweating in the overcrowded waiting area, glassy-eyed and listless, babies shrieking in the background. Everything feels haphazard—patient records lying in piles on the table, medications scattered in boxes on the floor, patients waiting in a throng at the front of the clinic—but there are also glimpses of organization. On the first day we learned that we would not be training 10 health workers, as we had originally been told, but forty. The Ghana Health Service had been so excited about our program that they had arranged for staff from surrounding clinics to be bused in daily. The health workers were enthusiastic, engaged, excited about learning this material that would help them better care for their patients.
Continue reading "Four days in" » |
The challenges that lie ahead |
With less than two weeks remaining before we depart to Elmina, our team has been busy working on preparations for our upcoming outreach. In less than one week, we will throw a fundraiser gala to raise money and to introduce ICHA to the bay area community through song, dance, and food. A week later, we will leave for Ghana. As things slowly come together, I find myself contemplating the challenges that lie ahead.
Though I’ve had some experience working in other cultures, I still find living and working in a foreign culture a difficult and complicated journey. The process of entering a distant culture, apart from it and yet a part of it, is both jarring and moving. When we are in Ghana, we must learn to reconcile the many inconsistencies inherent in what we’re doing. We have a strong belief in the power of community, the ability of a group of people to identify issues in their own community and bring about their own change. Yet, we are a foreign organization going in with specific notions about what needs to change. We go to Ghana to teach, but we also go to Ghana to learn. And we must somehow learn to navigate these two roles.
Continue reading "The challenges that lie ahead" » |
Returning to Elmina |
In little more than one month, the first ICHA outreach team will embark to Elmina, Ghana. For me, it will be a journey back to a place that affected me deeply, a town that provided the seed that eventually gave rise to this new organization aimed at educating communities to prevent the enormous suffering caused by untreated cardiovascular illness. It was the interactions with patients and individuals in this dynamic fishing village that helped me understand the pain that untreated cardiovascular disease causes people in underserved regions.
When I lived in Elmina in 2006, I learned to recognize the ubiquitous Akan symbols scattered throughout the town. These rich images somehow managed to use simple representations to illustrate deeply profound ideas. Gyename was perhaps the most common, crescent moons surrounding a gentle squiggle that symbolized faith and the omnipotence of God. But the symbol that perhaps resonated most deeply with me was sankofa. Sankofa, commonly represented as a bird looking backwards, translates literally to ‘go back and get it’, and illustrates positive progress through the benevolent use of knowledge, how the depth of experience from our collective pasts can and should be used to create a better future.
Continue reading "Returning to Elmina" »
About ICHA
The International Cardiovascular Health Alliance (ICHA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting cardiovascular health in the developing world. ICHA works closely with local clinics and community organizations to provide knowledge and tools to prevent cardiovascular disease.
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