7 - Beneath the Spin: Moral Complexity & Rhetorical Simplicity in ‘Global Health’ Volunteering

Summary

Two smiling young white men in sunglasses, proudly displaying teeshirts with the logo of their medical school, beamed from the cover photo of the alumni magazine. Behind them a wooden sign beginning with an all-capitals ‘CONGRATULATIONS’ announced that at 5,895 metres this was the highest point in Tanzania, Kilimanjaro's Uhuru Peak. The cover story's title: ‘STUDENTS TAKE THE COLLEGE OF HUMAN MEDICINE TO NEW HEIGHTS’.

As the story made clear, those ‘new heights’ represented the many volunteer opportunities taken up by medical students. The two men featured on the cover were the central illustration. Having just finished their first year of medical school, they ‘spent much of the summer caring for people in remote villages of Tanzania, where medical professionals seldom are seen. With little supervision from physicians, they travelled village to village caring for patients suffering from malaria, HIV, chronic pain and other illnesses’ (Michigan State University 2012: 3). The students were as enthusiastic about their experience as the reporter seemed to be. One of them was quoted as follows:

Just being thrust into a situation like that made all of the classes we took that first year very real … You learn quickly that way, because you don't have a choice … I don't think I could have done anything that would have recharged my batteries more … It was incredibly rejuvenating and reinforced my choice to go into medicine, to see the impact you have on people. You’re helping them, and they’re incredibly grateful for that. [ibid.: 3]

This celebration of clinical volunteer experience in an African context is one among many. Contemporary US and Canadian medical schools recruit students with the prospects of ‘global health electives’, and foreground global health institutes and programmes in pitches for donor support. Academic medical centres design and promote such service- learning electives as means to ‘capture’ student idealism (Smith & Weaver 2006). African sites are not the only places where global health electives, programmes, and volunteer opportunities are situated, but they are among the most popular – popular enough to have been characterized by one observer as part of a new scramble for Africa (Crane, 2013).

It is not just medical students who enthusiastically take up volunteer opportunities.