For two weeks each year in August, approximately 45 Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions (RMUoHP) team members composed of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends join local communities in Africa on a service trip to empower individual and community health. This year, the team worked in Lilongwe, Malawi. Lilongwe, Malawi is located on the south east side of Africa and has a population of around 18 million people.
This year the team of 45 people consists specifically of 32 students, faculty, alumni, and staff from RMUoHP and are distributed among the university as follows:
- 18 Master of Physician Assistant Studies students
- 2 Master of Physician Assistant Studies Faculty Leaders: Tyler Sommer (our Africa co-team lead) and Marie Pittman
- 3 Doctor of Physical Therapy cohort 8 students
- 3 Doctor of Physical Therapy cohort 9 students
- 1 Doctor of Physical Therapy Faculty Leader: Dr. Miriam Cortez-Cooper
- 1 Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology student
- 1 Master of Science in Speech-language Pathology Faculty Leader: Dr. Linda Spencer
- 1 volunteer is now employed as a student dissection assistant in our anatomy lab
- 1 volunteer is an RMU Alumni (our other Africa co-team lead)
- 1 Coordinator and a Volunteer for World of Difference: Betsy Maxwell
The remaining volunteers are family members or friends of the above, and overall, 8 out of 45 of team members have been on past Service Expeditions.
Led by team co-leaders, Dr. Melanie Carlone an RMUoHP alumna from the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program, and Tyler Sommer, the Associate Program Director for the Master of Physician Assistant Studies program, the RMUoHP team took their hearts, tools, clinical skills, and 4,500 pounds of donations to improve and expand the Selengo Primary School, to provide much-needed resources to two local orphanages, to teach and learn at the Malawi College of Health Sciences, and to provide clinical services at the Kamazu Central Hospital and Child Legacy International.
The chiefs, elders, villagers, and children, along with local institutional leaders, warmly welcomed and worked alongside RMUoHP volunteers. The long-term relationships and systems approach developed in Malawi over the past 4 years of the University’s service initiative, enable the team to accomplish much in just two weeks. Working side-by-side with children from the community, the team built a new three-room addition to the primary school, rejuvenated existing classrooms by sanding and painting walls, added painted numbers, alphabets and pictures, re-finished desks, repaired a teacher’s home, and poured the foundation for a new library.
The RMUoHP team not only participated in clinical rotations at the Kamazu Hospital but also held a third annual Medical Conference in collaboration with the Malawi College of Health Sciences. Students from both schools presented challenging and educational case studies. RMUoHP students in speech pathology, physical therapy, and physician assistant programs taught on selected healthcare topics. The conference concluded with the presentation of donated medical textbooks to Malawi medical students.
Sustainability is a core principle of the ongoing RMUoHP service initiative. Each year the team:
- Strives to build on the work done from prior years
- Empowers the community by providing training and resources that can be utilized in the future
- Provides water sustainability and permaculture training giving the local community the ability to build a healthy life for individuals and the environment.
“We are building friendships forever, strengthening our resolve to serve, to be clinicians, and to do for others with no expectation of anything in return,” said Carlone. “We accomplished much, and we are changing from the inside out.”
The team eats and plays and dances with the community and learns daily from the kindness, joy, resilience, gratitude, and endurance of the people of Lilongwe. They bring back transformational lessons from realizing that children are determined to learn even without the most basic educational tools we take for granted, that a teenager is overjoyed to receive an old dictionary as a gift, that singing and dancing together bridges cultures, and that medical students eagerly strive to serve their communities without the tools and resources we take for granted.
If you are interested in learning more about our Africa Service Trips and the other ways we love to serve at RMUoHP, please visit https://rmuohp.edu/service/
