UP CLOSE
By Brittney Knox
Pre-med, Spanish students volunteer at Nicaraguan health clinic
MOSAIC 2012
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wo students volunteering at a clinic witnessed the circle of life on only their second day of work. Georgia Gamble held the hand of a woman at the end of life as she took her last breath—while in the next room, two other students helped an infant girl take her first. Gamble, a junior on the pre-med track at the University of Alabama, joined six other Honors College students with a focus in medicine and Spanish to take their classroom experiences abroad in Nicaragua for two weeks in the summer of 2011. In Nicaragua, a Third World country,
there was a need for assistance in the clinics to help organize the pharmacy, shadow and aid the doctors and, oftentimes, just the need for an extra face to give a smile. On that day, Gamble unexpectedly had to witness something she would have to face further in her medical profession – death. “So I held her hand, and two minutes later she stopped breathing,” Gamble says. “I looked at the security guard with an AK47 straight across his chest. [He] had not smiled the entire time, and [I] asked, ‘Did she just die?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ That was the only time he had moved from his wall or said anything. I had to leave the room, and I
just started crying.” One room down the hall, UA student Amanda Wright held the hand of a young mother giving birth. “At first we were just watching the delivery, and didn’t realize that the doctors actually wanted us to help. They don’t have nurses walking around in Bugs Bunny scrubs to do the things like hold the mother’s hand or run and get things like we do in the United States, so that’s where we filled in,” Wright says. “I felt helpless watching the 15-year-old mother deliver her baby in what looked like a rusty chair with hardly any pain medicine, but I did what I
Photo main: (left to right)Georgia Gamble, Audrey Inman, Juan Black and Amanda Wright as photographed by Mitchell Hughes. Design by Jane Ellis.