a not-for-profit 501 C3 with a board of directors and an international cybernetwork of volunteers. The group now comprises EMTs, paramedics, nurses, physician assistants, public health specialists and physicians who respond to disasters all over the world. The most harrowing volunteer trip in recent months was a visit to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, where Kivlehan and his colleagues spent 10 days in January. “When something happens we put the word out,” Kivlehan says. “The organization focuses on immediate solutions: reducing fractures, debriding wounds, delivering babies. So that’s what we did.” Within two days of the Haiti earthquake, NYC Medics arrived with $30,000 in donations, along with medical and surgical supplies, tents, food and water. “The strangest thing,” Kivlehan says, “was how quickly it became normal to
see rubble around every corner, to see arms and legs sticking out of collapsed buildings, to smell dead bodies. It’s frightening how quickly we accept these things as normal.” Kivlehan, who is considering residencies in surgery and emergency medicine, might have stayed on in Haiti were it not for his studies, his ongoing paramedic duties and his part-time job with a textbook publisher. He hopes
to return this summer and, once he earns his M.D./M.P.H., to be part of the larger public health picture there and elsewhere in the world. He doesn’t expect his joint degree to afford him a Manhattan high-rise or the easy ability to repay his student loans, but it will position him to do his small part in saving the world. “I never want to be told that I don’t understand or I don’t have adequate training or am not qualified to push something through,” he says.
“The greatest part about living in the Western world is that you grow up believing in yourself and your dreams.” That’s how Vedika Nehra was raised: believing that she could turn her ideas about helping people into reality. Vedik a Nehr a, Class of 2010 Having such encouragement, as well as the means to pursue her dreams, is a privilege that children in developing countries rarely experience. Born to a family of crop farmers in the rural state of Haryana in India, Nehra knows this firsthand. “I’ve seen both sides,” says the fourth-year medical student, whose father’s work as a botanist moved the family all across the globe: first to Saskatchewan, Canada, then to Melbourne, Australia, during her middle school years, and finally to St. Louis, Mo., where she attended the (Background Photo by Vedika Nehra.)
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