Metasebiya Ayele Mamo walks wilfully to the bus stop still chewing on breakfast, ready for the first day of her fourth week in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana.
It is still only 6:50 a.m., but the Duke Kunshan alumnus has an early start, having recently taken up a Princeton in Africa fellowship at the Baylor Children’s Clinical Centre of Excellence there, which cares for children, adolescents and young adults with HIV.
It is a 20-minute ride to work in one of Gaborone’s ‘combis’, small minibuses that ferry people back and forth across the city. There, her co-workers are a multinational team predominantly from Botswana, but also from other countries including Uganda, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
“It has not been a difficult move. I have had to do some adjusting, especially with not knowing the language, but most people here speak English and my colleagues have been teaching me local words and phrases,” says Mamo, who comes from Ethiopia.
“It is also not an entirely new experience for me, because I have learned how to navigate multicultural spaces from my time at Duke Kunshan,” she adds.
Mamo graduated from DKU earlier this year as a member of the university’s pioneering inaugural Class of 2022. At DKU, she threw herself into life, taking on research projects from freshman year and working part time as a resident assistant, helping other students transition to campus life.
One of her early research projects focused on non-communicable diseases and when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she had to return to Ethiopia, she engaged in research looking at the impact of conflict on mental health in her homeland. There has been an ongoing conflict between the Ethiopian government and forces in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia since 2020. She has also participated in research with Columbia University’s Junior Researcher Program on the impact of income inequality on financial decision making, which was published in Nature Human Behavior.
Her degree from DKU in global health, and those research and work experiences, prepared Mamo well for her role in Botswana, where, at the beginning of August, she began work for the Baylor Children’s Clinical Centre of Excellence on a Princeton in Africa fellowship. Founded in 1999, by Princeton University in the United States, the fellowships match talented college graduates with organizations working across Africa for paid year-long service placements where they can make significant contributions in areas like education and public health. To date is has matched around 700 fellows with 100 host organizations across 37 countries in Africa.
The center is located at Princess Marina Hospital, in Gaborone and provides care for children and young people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), cancer and blood disorders. As well as helping patients maintain their physical health, it also focuses on mental health and education.
Mamo’s roles are varied. Today she will be reviewing volunteer applications and interviewing volunteer tutors who can help children catch up on schoolwork.
“The children here face multiple academic challenges. For some, their grades are affected because they miss lessons to get treatment for various ailments. For others, it is difficult to focus on school because they sometimes get bullied by their peers for their HIV status,” she says.
“Most of the tutors are students from local universities and because some of the children are not very comfortable with English, we aim to recruit people who are fluent in Setswana, which is the local language,” she adds.
She is also helping to organize Camp Hope, a family weekend getaway for children and their caregivers to build bonds, focus on mental health, encourage adherence to medication and have fun.
“There are activities like arts and crafts making, which is in part about taking something home with them from camp that they can look at and say, ‘Oh yes, I did that’,” she says.
“There are also team building activities, which are meant to strengthen bonds between the teens and between caregivers, so when they go home, they have someone who they can share things with If everything gets too difficult to bear on their own. And we have life skills activities, which are about learning basic life skills, problem solving and communicating with people,” she adds.
The job is similar to her role as a resident assistant at DKU, according to Mamo, “so that helps a lot.”
“I’ll be part of the leadership team during the camp, so I’ll be out there training camp staff, planning activities for camp, and participating in the camp, making sure everything goes well,” she says.
Mamo’s third role while at centre is to conduct research into the sexual health of adolescents and young adults living with HIV in Botswana. The country has one of the highest HIV rates in the world at 20.3 percent of the population, around 370,000 people, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). However, it has also made progress in tackling the problem and was one of the first countries in the world to reach the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) 95-95-95 before 2030 goal, as well as receiving the World Health Organization’s (WHO) silver tier status for near-elimination of mother-to-child HIV transmission. The 95-95-95 goal refers to ensuring 95% of people with HIV know they have the virus, 95% of them are on treatment and 95% of those on treatment are virally suppressed.
Mamo will be asking adolescents and young adults aged 15-24 about their perspectives on sexual health, with a view to developing ideas on how to improve access to services and break down taboos in talking about it.
“It is important to let people know where services are and how to seek them, and that we know what the barriers are to using those services and having open conversations so they can be addressed,” she says.
During her morning break Mamo stops to catch a breath and eat a magwinya (fat cake), balls of fried dough that are similar to donuts. The center cares for around 1,300 children and young adults, so there is a lot of work ahead for her.
“Our aim is to support patients, physically and psychologically, in whatever way we can. To make sure they do not miss out on education, help see them through hard times and give them something to smile about,” she says. “And my personal mission is to be a part of this work, to make an impact, and to learn through the experience,” she adds.
