Sara Eftekhar (UBC Nursing 2) interviews Matt Sibley (UBC Med 4) in a feature report on students as global citizens.
“You can’t go back to looking at the world the same way once you’ve seen that side of the world.”
Students are increasingly becoming the forefront of Global Health. At UBC’s Global Health Initiative, students are the driving force of international development illustrating global citizenship through interdisciplinary team work to solve complex health problems. Often driven by passion, curiosity and creativity, students challenge themselves to analyze the contexts that disease exist and are determined to making a significant contribution in vulnerable and underserved populations around the world.
Matt Sibley (fourth year medicine) exemplifies how students can make an impact in sustainable cross cultural community development work while at the same time having an academic and student lifestyle. Matt has committed his time and efforts to GIVE: an organization based in Kenya that enhances the lives of Kanyawegi villagers.
Matt’s curiosity in international development was first sparked during his third year in undergrad at UBC when he did some conflict resolution for Sudan with Amnesty International. His passion for improving health equity evolved out of his sense of responsibility and duty to act on injustices around the world despite his privilege of growing up in Canada.
“Comparing myself to my grandparents who went through the great depression and lived through the World War, I refer to myself as coming from a spoiled generation. I’ve never known what it means to go hungry or have any hardships that people face in this community or in other parts of the world. There’s just something about justice that’s not quite fair and that’s what got me involved in the first place. It’s left me with this feeling of why me? How did I get so lucky? This got me thinking to how I can do something for those that are unfortunate” explains Matt.
Through a few acquaintances, he became involved with the initial stages of establishing the GIVE project and throughout his five year involvement; he has gotten to be a part of something where he can make a positive impact in the lives of others.
The GIVE projects original mandate was to bring HIV/AIDS education to areas of Kenya with a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS infection by a group of UBC students. With the idea of combating this pandemic, the group designed a curriculum to bring more HIV/AIDS awareness to this community. However, Matt admits that at first he and his group were unsure of how to approach the community’s health problems yet they were still very motivated and keen to do their part.
After coming back from Kanyawagi with many lessons learned about cross cultural teaching, Matt and his group realized that providing HIV education to the village was not enough; health problems were more complex than they imagined.
“We came back and realized that poverty was the key issue and making [all the other health problems] worse including the HIV/AIDS problem. Therefore we expanded our vision of community development by initiating and dividing our projects to different categories: Food security nutrition, health, economic development while still maintaining the culturally appropriate HIV/AIDSs education. [Also], we wanted to focus on sustainability which requires perseverance and time. Since then we have been organizing things slowly with different student volunteers and [structuring the organization] as we move forward” says Matt.
Students have played a major role in establishing the progress of GIVE; every year a team of students from different faculties have the opportunity to travel to Kanyawegi and devote their time and passion to the success of GIVE projects. There’s a lot of responsibility put on the students when they travel to Kanyawegi and there’s a required two year minimum commitment from them.
“In the end the students get more out of the international experience than the community does. You can’t go back to looking at the world the same way once you’ve seen that side of the world. When students see life on another spectrum, it changes their perspective of the world for the better. ”
Becoming a part of global health project, Matt’s idea of development gradually changed. Like many students, gaining experience in another country, made him analyze the complexity of aid and development.
“The first time I traveled to Kenya, we put packages of clothing for orphans and we thought it would be a good idea to give it to them while we were visiting their homes. Now, looking back I would not do that type of charity work; I’ve matured a lot in how I can help and what it means to actually make a positive contribution in another community. If you give an [underprivileged] community some clothes and then fly out, all that is doing is just contributing to aid dependency; where a community lacks empowerment and becomes reliant on aid work. It took some time for me to grasp what helping means but going to kanyawegi shifted my mentality.”
GIVE focuses on empowering and supporting the Kanyawegi community members to become independent. One example of how this is the community bank that has been established Kanyawegi which includes a microcredit project giving loans to individuals with a proposed business plan the opportunity for economic growth.
Matt’s long term commitment to GIVE is mostly due to the stories he hears from the people of Kanyawegi.
“Some of the stories that came out were so heart wrenching. It would have felt like I would be turning my back on [the Kanyawegi community] if I didn’t stay involved with them. I can’t see myself turning my back to this community ever now .”
As well, the experiences Matt has gained over the years in Kanyawagi will stay with him forever and influence his career as a medical doctor.
“It will be hard for my international experiences not to influence my practice. In fact it has been a valuable part of my medical education. The cultural awareness that I have gained is particularly valuable in the diverse community I live in [in Vancouver]. My plan is to continue my work as an advocate for Kanyawegi throughout my career.”
For more information about the GIVE project, please visit: www.givesociety.org