Global Health Advocacy: Rayna Sobieski '10
Rayna Sobieski was 14 and attending high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when she took her first trip to the remote mountains of Honduras. That summer and on succeeding visits, Rayna accompanied her mother, a dental hygienist who was part of a volunteer medical brigade. Joining the team, Rayna helped set up a school-based clinic and traveled from village to village teaching children to brush their teeth and offering other basic lessons in health and hygiene.
“I fell in love with Latin American culture, and with the ability to see immediate change,” Rayna says. “It was amazing to put a smile on the children’s faces.” She returned to Honduras five times after that, assisting with physical exams, acting as a Spanish-English translator for doctors and patients, and helping distribute medications. Her summer destination differed last year, when she completed an internship in Guadalajara, Mexico. There she visited local schools and wrote and translated articles for a women’s empowerment institute that specializes in domestic-violence education.
“In Latin America, I’ll always be seen as an outsider,” Rayna acknowledges. Her eventual aim is to practice rural medicine there as an ob/gyn, and for that reason, she says, “It’s good for me learn how to work as an outsider within a local structure, and to be able to speak the same language literally and metaphorically with the people there. For example, conversations with and among women in the Mexican countryside are very different from what you’ll experience among Mexican women here in New York.”
This is the first summer Rayna has spent in the United States in a long time but she’s still found a way to put her fluency in Spanish to excellent use. Supported by Barnard’s Alexis Knox Internship Fund, she is participating in research conducted by medical anthropologist Dr. Jennifer Hirsch at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Filling a post usually reserved for graduate students, Rayna analyzes data and transcribes interviews that Dr. Hirsch and postgraduate fellows are conducting in Mexico and the Mexican and Dominican communities of upper Manhattan. Their goal is to gauge the successes and failures of antiretroviral treatment for HIV-positive individuals, and to better understand how migration, gender and marital relations, social stigmatization, and other societal factors are affecting the treatment success rate.
“I want to be a doctor and help people feel better, but I want to deal with the bigger issues affecting people’s health. That’s why I wanted to work with Dr. Hirsch this summer,” Rayna says. That’s also why Rayna plans to postpone medical school for a year or two after her Barnard graduation, and, “maybe pursue a master’s degree in public health, or travel and do more research before I focus on the pure medical science.”
For now, she’s looking forward to her junior year and the courses that will fulfill her major in women’s studies with a concentration in Latin American cultures and pre-medicine. “I am so happy to be at Barnard. I think it’s a perfect fit for me—the diversity of my friends, their passion for what they’re doing, the small size of the college, the professors, the courses, the administration,” she says. She’s especially grateful for the opportunity to be living and working in New York this summer, and praises Dr. Hirsch and others at the Mailman School “for helping me get the most out of the experience.”
Rayna is leaving the city for a short time in August, to travel to Mexico City for the first International AIDS Conference ever held in Latin America. It’s not her first global conference. In 2005, she was a delegate to the People to People International Peace Conference in Egypt, where she met and befriended students from all over the world.
For this courageous and globally minded young woman, there are no borders or boundaries to friendship, compassion, and altruism.
—Anne Schutzberger
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