The first week or two, in pictures & highlights

My first view of the WHO, as I walked to work on my first day:

This board caught my eye as I walked into the building on my second day of work:

What a privilege and responsibility -- to have a mission as important as this one. We all have both the honor and duty to uphold and advance on this mission, to help all people attain the highest possible level of health, whether our position is intern or high level officer, whether the work at the center is entrenched in big bureaucracy and health politics or not.

Here's the view from my desk:

The view and Geneva, in general, are absolutely gorgeous. 

Here's my team at the WHO's Emergency and Essential Surgical Care (EESC) program for the next couple months:

From left to right: me, Dr. Farooq Khan (intern and senior emergency medicine resident from Canada), Dr. Meena Cherian (WHO EESC program director), Dr. Saptarshi Chatterjee (intern and dentist from India), and not pictured, our absolutely lovely administrator, Ms. Fiona Constable. 

Saptarshi, Farooq, and I are particularly lucky to be interning at the WHO during the 66th World Health Assembly. In the photo above, we stopped for a moment on a day of sprinting between meetings with ministers of health, advisors, and other delegates to discuss incorporating EESC in national health plans.

We also spent some time advancing EESC and other programs in our Health Systems and Innovation (HIS) department at our WHA galleria booth. One of our wonderful department administrators, Ms. Vine Maramba, found this photo of me in the WHA photo gallery on the WHO Intranet pages (credit official WHO/WHA photographers). In it, I'm telling a WHA attendee that stopped at our stand about the EESC program:

Along with free informational handouts, publications, and pens, our HIS stand featured freshly brewed cups of coffee and espresso for folks that stopped to chat. On one of the WHA days, I was lucky to become our booth's in-house coffee-brewing expert. As attendees waited for their free espresso or coffee to brew, they got to hear a lot from me about EESC and how our program supported and partnered with health ministries. A funny moment included when I sillily asked one sharply dressed man waiting for me to finish brewing his espresso whether he worked in his country's ministry of health; he responded simply, "I am the health minister." Who knew that (wo)manning the coffee at the department's WHA booth would turn out to be such a neat place to be as an intern?

I also got to attend some great WHA talks and briefings. My favorite speech of the week was delivered by one of my long-time heroes in medicine, Dr. Jim Kim:

My favorite lines from the World Bank President's speech were:

The fragmentation of global health action has led to inefficiencies that many ministers here know all too well: parallel delivery structures; multiplication of monitoring systems and reporting demands; ministry officials who spend a quarter of their time managing requests from a parade of well-meaning international partners.  

This fragmentation is literally killing people.  Together we must take action to fix it, now...  

Change will come—it’s happening now. The issue is whether we will take charge of change: become its architects, rather than its victims. The gravest danger is that we might make decisions by default, through inaction. Instead, we must make bold commitments... 

Together, let’s build health equity and economic transformation as one single structure, a citadel to shelter the human future. Now is the time to act...  

We must be the generation that breaks down the walls of poverty’s prison, and in their place builds health, dignity and prosperity for all people.   

Here's a panel on Addressing Violence Against Women: 

The panel featured, from left to right, Dr. Mercedes Juan Lopez (Secretary of Health, Mexico), Mrs. Laurette Onkelinx (Minister of Social Affairs, Belgium), Dr. Keshav Desiraju (Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India), Dr. Mustapha S. Kaloko (Commissioner for Social Affairs, African Union), Dr. Flavia Bustreo (Assistant Director General of the WHO Family, Women's and Children's department), Dr. Etienne Krug (Director of the WHO Violence, Injury Prevention and Disability program), Mrs. Kathleen Sebelius (Secretary of Health and Human Services, USA), Dr. Joseph Kasonde (Minister of Health, Zambia), and Mrs. Lilianne Ploumen (Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, Netherlands). Each distinguished panelist discussed their national health sector's response to violence against women.

All in all, it's been an interesting time, my first week or two here at the WHO in Geneva. I'm looking forward to the weeks to come!