Eye-opening Africa trip gives doctor purpose in telling stories

Leana Wen, MD, is a regular New York Times reader with a deep interest in health care and international policy. So she did not hesitate to apply when she saw the paper had an essay contest for a three-week trip to Africa with Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.

She saw the announcement in her fourth year as a medical student at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Wen was intrigued because a few weeks earlier she had returned from three months in Rwanda working with HIV-positive women who had survived the genocide. "When I had gone as an aid worker, I heard stories, but I wanted to make a difference through telling those stories," she said.

Beating out 2,000 other applicants, Dr. Wen and a Chicago school teacher, Will Okun, got a chance to do just that. The duo accompanied Kristof to Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in June for a firsthand look at the impact of the civil war. During the trip, they posted blogs and helped produce video clips about their experiences for the Times.

Dr. Wen said the experience was powerful. In one Congo village, residents had been driven out by soldiers. When they returned, their livestock and crops were gone. One woman was particularly desperate. She and her family had been living on bananas, having spent all their money to care for her after an illness. Barely weighing 50 pounds, she was dying as an infection ravaged her body.

Dr. Wen convinced her team to take the woman to the hospital in Goma, where she began her recovery.

"There were parts of the trip where I became immune to the stories," Dr. Wen said. "I felt a lot of despair, but at the same time, so many people are doing good things too. It's important to not let that get lost."

Amid the interviews with national leaders and displaced individuals, Dr. Wen said she learned the power of listening. "If you listen without judgment, they will tell you their stories, which is important to journalism and medicine," Dr. Wen said.

In September, Dr. Wen begins a two-year Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford in England, where she plans to study health care in developing countries and international policy. When she returns, she plans an emergency medicine residency. Ultimately, she wants to find a way to combine her interests in clinical medicine and health policy.