Final Reflection

“So what? What now?”

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 This is a question I return to often, one that was quietly threaded through every course I took, every conversation I had in Tanzania, and every moment I spent wrestling with a language that did not come easily to me. I did not arrive at UF asking that question. I arrived merely with an interest to further my understanding of medical anthropology and seniors' healthcare access. The International Scholars program fundamentally changed who I am and still am striving to become, from my personal attributes to my professional goals. 

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The shift began in the classroom. Courses like Culture & Medicine, Global Public Health, and Africa in World History expanded my way of thinking to ideas I had little exposure to beforehand: health is not merely a biological state, but a political one. Who receives adequate pain care, who is believed when they report suffering, and who has access to treatment are not random outcomes. Instead, they are the products of historical decisions, economic structures, and cultural assumptions that have been built up over generations. Learning about the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and World Bank, for instance, was not an abstract economics lesson. It was an explanation for what I would later witness firsthand at Tosamaganga District Hospital: the resource constraints, the improvisation, the gaps that healthcare providers filled through sheer ingenuity and dedication. The classroom gave me the framework and my lived experiences of conducting research and planning events allowed me to apply the knowledge gained.    

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​What I did not expect was how much my research would unsettle me in the best possible way. I arrived in Iringa with a methodology, a set of interview questions, and the confidence of someone who had prepared thoroughly. Within the first weeks, I understood that preparation and certainty are different things. When my rank-ordering method could not be implemented as planned, I had to make real decisions under real conditions , not in a seminar room where being wrong is a learning opportunity, but in a fieldsite where people had agreed to share their experiences with me and deserved my best thinking. Adapting in that moment taught me something no course could have: that good research requires the humility to recognize when your original plan is insufficient, reflect on your own positionality, and the confidence to build a better one.