“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can do the next thing that comes along.’...You must do the thing you cannot do,” wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in You Learn by Living. During her life, she “handed out cups of coffee...to trainloads of soldiers en route to army camps,” visited veteran’s mental hospitals talking with wounded soldiers, and served as Chairman of the Red Cross. She recognized the world’s need for assistance and accepted that need as her calling. Today that kind of commitment is desperately needed in a world where many African clinics with inadequate medical supplies must send their HIV patients home to save money for their families: transporting a living body is less expensive than transporting a corpse. To change this horror, an increase in qualified medical personnel is desperately needed. As a future physician assistant in the Doctors Without Borders (DWB) program, I have the chance to assist populations in distress.

The Doctors Without Borders program was brought to my attention two years ago by an upperclassman I admired during my tenth grade year at the Illinois Math and Science Academy. She cited Rachel Cohen, an Advocacy Liaison for DWB, who reported the grim reality of health needs in developing countries: “36 million people infected with HIV, 2 million deaths per year from TB, 300-500 million new cases of malaria each year.” Since these diseases are successfully treated in the United States, I couldn’t help but wondering why people in third world countries can’t get the help they need. Remarking on the difference between HIV treatment in Italy and Africa, Laura Ciaffi, a DWB working in Cameroon, says, “I recently went back to visit my old clinic in Milan, and I was so happy — and surprised — to meet many of my old patients. They were supposed to have died of AIDS years ago. One day, perhaps five years from now, I hope to come back to Cameroon to see the same thing.”

Since an increase in medical resources would make this hope a reality, I plan to become a physician assistant with DWB. With this goal in mind, I am currently studying Anatomy and Physiology, French, and Spanish. During the next three years, I will complete 128 hours of pre-physician assistant classes at the University of St. Francis in Joliet and over 1,500 hours of volunteering and job shadowing at the Ottawa Regional Hospital. A biology degree, together with clinical experience, will qualify me for St. Francis’s graduate program, where I will earn my Masters in Science in Physician Assistant Studies. This degree will enable me to “take medical histories, examine patients, interpret lab results, make diagnoses, treat minor injuries with stitches, splints, and casts, and prescribe certain medications” around the world.

My vision of saving lives with Doctors Without Borders motivates me as I complete my senior year of high school. Having the skills needed to leap into action when disaster hits and to save patients with AIDS, TB, or malaria keeps me focused in increasingly challenging classes. Every obstacle along the way takes me a step closer to a life dedicated to helping others in work that knows no borders.*