My name is Autumn and I am one of the students with funding through Students for Development (AUCC) to do an international placement this Fall. As a graduate student in Public Health I wanted to do an internship in an area of Global Health. Therefore, I am doing my internship with an international organization focused on improving global health and health equity. I am based in their country office in Lima, Peru.

I have now been in Peru for about 6 weeks. It has really been an interesting/challenging experience doing everything in Spanish. At first it was really tough. Even with having a base level of upper intermediate Spanish, I had to teach myself all the vocabulary for epidemiology and statistics in Spanish in order to read all the documents related to the project and also to be able to communicate effectively with my co-workers about the project.

The project I am working on is based in an area of Lima with an incidence rate of Tuberculosis 10 times higher than the national average. I am working with a team of consultants to organize the existing data relating to tuberculosis for the community and the functioning of the tuberculosis treatment program in the community health center. We are also developing a survey to give to (1) patients accessing the clinic for TB treatment; (2) patients accessing the clinic for other health issues; and (3) members of the general community. We want to examine barriers to accessing TB treatment services in the clinic with a focus on gender differences in access and perceived barriers, stigma and discrimination against people with TB as well as collect data on socio-demographic indicators. It is a very interesting an exciting project to be working on. We are hoping to being administering the survey within the next two weeks. The end products we are hoping to produce are advocacy resources for the community regarding the TB in the community as well as a report to be disseminated to other organizations, with in the ministry of health and to other stakeholders.

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