A Head Start in Healthcare

Komarek stands with several Ugandan men, women and children as they pose for a photo. Komarek stands for a picture with her extended host family in Senegal after spending the day shelling peanuts, drinking tea and playing with the children. (Image credit: courtesy of Tessarae Komarek)
By Christopher Austin

The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) attracts a variety of students who take what they learn and then go on to change the world.  But some have a head start before they even arrive.

Tesserae Komarek stands next to Cheikh Tandian, her village’s health care worker and her work counterpart. They are both holding insecticide-treated bed nets and there are more nets piled up behind them.
Tesserae Komarek, currently a second lieutenant in the United States
Air Force, spent two years in Senegal where she worked with her
work counterpart, and the village’s health care worker, Cheikh Moctar
Tandian. Together, they distributed insecticide-treated bed nets to
villagers before the rainy season began to prevent malaria outbreaks
in their village.
Air Force 2nd Lt. Tesserae Komarek and Navy Ensign William Douthitt are two first-year students at USU’s F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine who each served in the Peace Corps, going abroad to help participating nations tackle pressing community and environmental issues.

“I’m interested in global health and development as a whole, so I thought the Peace Corps would be a great opportunity to get on-the-ground-experience, to not only enrich my understanding of the field I’m going into, but also get personal and life experience,” said Komarek. She spent two years with the Peace Corps in Senegal. The primary focus of the work she did there was helping to reduce the burden of malaria on the community, as well as promoting water sanitation and hygiene.

Douthitt was stationed in Uganda, where he similarly worked on disease prevention in his community along with assessing local clinics and training midwives.

“Before I went into medicine I thought I’d do a career in international development, so the Peace Corps seemed like a pretty good option,” Douthitt said. “In high school, I did some service work over in East Asia and really enjoyed it. After college, I was itching to go abroad and have an adventure.”

When they first arrived at their respective assignments, the volunteers were placed with host families who ran them through intensive language and cultural training.

Komarek was placed with the family of the village chief, and was given a Senegalese name – Tiguida Tandian, while she was serving. She was partnered with the chief’s son, who just so happened to be the village’s local health care worker, as her primary work counterpart.

One of the most important projects they worked on was getting the community to hang up mosquito nets. Mosquitoes transmit malaria in the region, and by putting up a net around the bed while sleeping, locals can greatly decrease their chances of being bitten by the pests and thereby decrease their chances of getting the disease. However, members of Komarek’s  village thought putting up a mosquito net was too difficult and time consuming. But, Komarek had a plan.

Douthitt plays guitar to a crowd of students who have gathered outside during a clear day.
Douthitt and another Peace Corps volunteer spent a week traveling to various schools, orphanages and churches in their region of Uganda to teach people songs and give basic guitar lessons. (Image credit: courtesy of William Douthitt)

“I created a care group of women; each family compound sent one representative to our care group, and during one of our meetings I arranged a three-legged race to hang a mosquito net. The women’s legs were tied together and they ran across the yard to grab the net, put it up and get under it all while tied together,” she said. “My host brother and other health care worker said the women wouldn’t do that, it’s way too weird, they’re never going to get into the game. But the women got super into it... We were having so much fun and making so much noise that people from around the village came over just to watch.”

The following week, Komarek conducted a survey and found that a lot more people had put up their nets and they specifically mentioned the game as an influence.

“It was very exciting that an unconventional idea had led to positive outcome,” she said.

Each volunteer’s experience is different, and the relationships that they form can be the greatest takeaways from their experiences. Douthitt worked alongside a young man named Brian while at one of his placements in Uganda, who planned on opening his village to foreign markets once he got his business degree. Douthitt was able to provide him with computer training in addition to their Peace Corps work.

“Brian was about my age at the time, and was doing some volunteer work with the organization I was placed with. He was in secondary school completing his A-levels – since they follow the British system over there. He’s incredibly bright but he took time off school to go into construction to pay for school fees for himself and his siblings,” Douthitt said. “I realized this experience isn’t about being the change-maker, it’s about helping the people who are the change-makers achieve whatever goals they need; help them develop the skills they need to become successful.”

Douthitt’s experience observing the local doctors, and working within the healthcare aspect of the Peace Corps led to him change his career path from international development to family medicine. It was just a question of how to achieve it.

Six Ugandan men and women stand around a mannequin of a baby that they have put a breathing mask on and are taking its vitals.
While in Uganda with the Peace Corps, Navy Ensign William Douthitt
was assigned to the Save the Children’s maternal, child, and neonatal
health program. While there, he worked with trainers from the
Ugandan Ministry of Health to train local maternal and child health
workers in infant delivery and caregiving. (Image credit: Navy Ensign
William Douthitt)
“A lot of things attracted me to [USU], one of them was the camaraderie among the students that I heard a lot about,” Douthitt said. “I had a friend going to USU in the Navy while I was in the Peace Corps. He was a great resource to use to get some perspective. Overall, I just felt it was a natural extension of [community] service.”

Komarek made her decision to pursue medicine before joining the Peace Corps, and was planning on joining the military when she returned from abroad.

“I interned at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when I was a senior in college, and one of the women I worked closely with received her Masters of Public Health from [USU]. I’m interested in working for the government as a general life path. She said that the best way to do that is to have a service background,” she said. “When I visited and interviewed, there was an air of professionalism and friendliness that I had not experienced at other medical schools. I thought I could walk into a room and become friends and colleagues with the people I had met.”

In addition to caring for U.S. service members and their families, many USU alumni participate in humanitarian missions all over the world, providing healthcare to communities that don’t have access to the resources that the U.S. has. When it’s Komarek’s and Douthitt’s turn, they will already be one step ahead.