“It’s a movement now and there is work to be done.”

An in-depth interview with an Ethiopian American doctor who is talking, healing and inspiring. (continued)

Tiberah Tsehai, TsehaiNY.com
Published October 1, 2008

Touching Lives Across Oceans   

Mehret has traveled and worked as a public health practitioner in Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa.  “These were different experiences at different stages of my learning.  I found public health before I found medicine.”   

In Kenya, Mehret interned at a Family Life Training Center that was mostly focused on issues of food security and malnourishment.  “But in the process I began to see the toll HIV was having on the community because most of the beds in the local clinic were occupied by HIV patients.”  In Botswana, she was involved in a HIV vaccine trial and was in charge of developing community education materials for the trial.  “This meant I was out in the community speaking and teaching about HIV. 

Dr. Mehret Mandefro during a lecture at Columbia University (Photo Credit: TruthAIDS)

Dr. Mehret Mandefro completed her internal medicine residency at Montefiore in the Primary Care Program. She received her M.D. from Harvard University, MSc in the Public Health of Developing Countries at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and A.B. in Anthropology from Harvard University.
I learned a lot about what the Batswana people thought about HIV, and even more about what it was going to take to build trust around these issues.”  Then in South Africa, Mehret became involved in HIV treatment as well as education about antiretrovirals at a clinic just outside of Durban that was treating patients for free.  “I got to see some patients, but more importantly I got to go out and help teach health care professionals about antiretroviral therapy.”  This work took Mehret to South Africa’s prisons where she taught nurses about antiretroviral.  “I was astounded to see the toll of the epidemic.  It was literally everywhere.”

In Ethiopia and the South Bronx, Mehret analyzed HIV-positive women’s experiences with stigma.  The work she did in Ethiopia was Mehret’s medical anthropology thesis for her public health degree.  She describes stigma as being very much related to issues of discrimination in general and says it’s about the issue of the “other”.

Mehret explains, the “other” can be race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or in this case HIV.  “What I learned about comparing experiences of HIV across the ocean was the huge issue of domestic violence. Domestic violence cuts across race, class, and ethnicity.”  Mehret used to think it was issues of relationships that connected across race, class, and ethnicity. 

“But what I learned was that the way Ethiopian women talk about all of that was really different from the South Bronx women.  Largely due to cultural norms around sex in general and also because food, housing, and access to medical care were ahead of their concerns about HIV.”  What a woman will do to provide for her children also tended to be similar.  “They were dependent on their partners for housing, and money for example.  Their dependence actually meant that if domestic violence was in the picture, they would shut up and take it.  That’s part of what made me realize that for some women, our current HIV prevention messages are actually hurting them.” 
 


 



  
             
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