Ignite | Fall 2022
Wheeled to Serve
BY RODERICK L. INGRAM SR.
On a route to school that was filled with experiences destined to inform her future, Cynthia Uzoukwu (pronounced oo-Zah-oo-kwoo) found her passion. While pursuing her post-baccalaureate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, she lived in the city of Philadelphia, just a few miles away from the campus community of both Penn and Drexel University that’s so big, it is called University City. And like many large university communities in urban areas, it is connected to impoverished neighborhoods. Uzoukwu’s commute passed a homeless shelter and a soup kitchen. On many occasions, she would see a homeless man in a wheelchair. Same location every time, any time of day.
Some might look away from those who are homeless, whether out of respect for another’s dignity or out of discomfort. But Uzoukwu is observant. While passing by, she noticed that the man’s wheelchair was missing a wheel. “How can a person use a wheelchair without a wheel?” Uzoukwu recalled wondering.
Her commute became a rite of passage — a social movement to her North Star. The condition of the person, as well as the social conditions that may have contributed to him being there, became clearer.
She started working with homeless shelters and soup kitchens. She also started a group called Affecting Social Justice in Medicine, which partnered with area restaurants to donate food they didn’t sell. The group would collect the food and take it to the soup kitchens.
The walk to Penn was Uzoukwu’s first real exposure to the depth of poverty impacting the underserved. It also convinced her of the best pathway to her North Star of caring for the underserved – becoming a Doctor of Medicine.
AFFECTING SOCIAL JUSTICE
After graduating from Penn, Uzoukwu sought a medical school that shared her passion for helping underserved communities and that would allow her to bring positive change to issues that impacted them.
She found the perfect match at Northeast Ohio Medical University. As a first-year student in the College of Medicine, Uzoukwu became immediately engaged, re-creating the Affecting Social Justice in Medicine group at NEOMED.
Upon starting the group, she realized that beyond just helping people locally, students could benefit from exposure to other’s cultures, as well as their countries of origin.
“America is a melting pot of people from so many different places, and although students at NEOMED are very diverse, we also have some students who have not had exposure to certain cultures,” Uzoukwu said. “And I think that putting them in positions where they’re indulged in other cultures, will help broaden — myself included — our understanding and knowledge.
“That’s when I came up with the idea of a global health trip.”
“IT’S AFRICA, I KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON.”
Until she was 15, Uzoukwu lived in Nigeria and was exposed to a health care system that wasn’t nearly as developed as it is in the U.S.
She noted that although there were improvements to be made to the U.S. health care system, the challenges were very different from those in a developing country where anything related to mental health or neurodegenerative diseases, for instance, was not well understood.
“We had people [suffering from mental illness] who would just walk around the streets without receiving any care,” Uzoukwu said. “I knew there had to be a better alternative.”
Seeing people so grossly underserved was painful to her. And her longing to help them never waned.
As she neared the end of her first year as a medicine student, she organized a global health trip to Kenya, in partnership with Bernard Fassl, NEOMED’s Director of the Center for Global Health Innovation.
Although Kenya is on the opposite coast from Nigeria, the chance to help on the continent of Africa was appealing. Uzoukwu felt it would fulfill her decade-long desire to help in a developing health care system, in a place with which she thought she would be familiar.
“I had never been to Kenya,” Uzoukwu added, “but I was like, ‘I grew up in Nigeria, so the culture and experience should be similar.’”
In fact, the contrasts were eye-opening. Approximately 2,000 miles from Nigeria, the countries are very different. The first place Uzoukwu visited was a place in Nairobi, called Kibera, the largest slum in Africa and one of the biggest in the world.
The global health team of which Uzoukwu was a part worked with a Mully Children’s Family (MCF), a nonprofit that provides holistic care and protection to vulnerable children including orphans, child mothers and others who are neglected, abused, abandoned or simply do not have access to basic needs.
“We visited the mother of a rescued child, along with the child who was rescued,” Uzoukwu recalled. “When I got there, it was beyond anything I could’ve expected. His mother had [five] other children. I believe two of them were her own and the other three were from family members who had passed away. She was raising them in a small house not as big as a standard office in the United States, and yet was so welcoming and willing to share everything she had.
“Seeing her child, she teared up when she talked about how many opportunities he had now that she would have been unable to provide him,” Uzoukwu added. “I think that was our first real wake-up call.”
Drive. Resilience. Hope.
Later, Uzoukwu and team stayed at an orphanage, where they would meet and hear the stories of so many more children.
With her eyebrows rising and voice echoing every inflection point in the children’s horrific lives, Uzoukwu recalled her discussions with them. And as she described how they would so calmly tell the stories of where they came from, where they were at present and where they hoped to go, it became evident that their hopefulness and positivity had a huge impact on her.
Uzoukwu’s team was able to mentor the children and determine ways to make the MCF facility more sustainable for the children and the community. This included assisting in the development of a new level 4 community hospital. However, their main takeaway was much bigger.
“Toward the end of the trip, [the team] felt like we had gotten so much more from the trip than we had come there to give,” Uzoukwu said.
Upon leaving the orphanage, Uzoukwu’s group visited another side of Kenya: metropolitan Nairobi.
Staying in the business district of Nairobi, Uzoukwu recognized that all of Kenya was not without resources. The buildings, the place they stayed — all were beautiful. They met the Maasai people and learned about their culture. They also went on safari and observed different animals.
The contrasts with Kibera reminded her that sometimes it’s not necessarily that a country doesn’t have money. Sometimes it’s because what a country has is not being distributed adequately.
SHARED STORIES. SHARED KNOWLEDGE.
The one-month global experience left Uzoukwu with an even deeper understanding of other cultures and self.
“It definitely has impacted who I will be as a physician,” Uzoukwu said. With an emphasis on the importance of Community Needs Assessment, she added, “There’s no one-size-fits-all to address health care issues. Now that we’ve done something in rural Kenya, we cannot simply implement it in suburban Kenya or Nigeria. They are quite different.”
Uzoukwu, now in her second year as a medical student, plans to work with her student group, Affecting Social Justice in Medicine, to partner with an organization in Cleveland, Ohio, called Refugee Response.
She says that it’s important for anyone, especially children, to know that horrible things have “happened” to them, but such things do not define them.
“Whatever their circumstances were, that’s not their identity,” said Uzoukwu. When one girl who had just begun college felt taunted if not haunted by questions such as, “How does it feel growing up as an orphan?” Uzoukwu said her story resonated so much with her that she shared her own story. “I said to her, ‘Take pride in your story because it brought you where you are today.’ I could tell that she really took it in.”
* photos published with permission from families