‘Seeing the End and the Beginning’.
It’s all in the timing.
“Whatever you need me to do, I will do,” MPH student Lindsay White said when she arrived at the Vietnam offices of Pathfinder International. That turned out to be plenty, as White found herself helping a brand new consulting firm take over for a major international NGO.
Supported by the Santander Universities Scholarship Program, White expected her practicum to be an evaluation of mobile Continuing Medical Education (mCME) among HIV clinicians in the country, part of a project using daily text messages to encourage Vietnamese healthcare workers to study.
Pathfinder International, a Watertown, Massachusetts-based NGO promoting sexual and reproductive health, began the project last year with Boston University School of Public Health researchers, Hanoi School of Public Health, Hanoi Medical University, Thái Nguyên Provincial Department of Public Health, and the Vietnamese Ministry of Health.
But when White arrived at Pathfinder’s office in Hanoi, the organization was in the process of leaving Vietnam, having achieved its goals in the country over the last two decades.
White is still working on the mobile learning evaluation, but most of her role in Hanoi has turned out to be helping with the transition, as Pathfinder’s work is taken over by a newly launched organization: Consulting and Researching on Community Development (CRCD).
CRCD is led by Bao Le Ngoc, the former head of Pathfinder International Vietnam, and much of the staff are making the shift with him from the international NGO to the new in-country public health consultancy.
“They are now having to completely reset their framework,” says White. “Pathfinder has been a powerhouse in Vietnam for 22 years. They have had the funding and name recognition to build strong relationships with stakeholders and have had access to the tools they needed to implement successful programs and interventions.”
With CRCD also expanding beyond the scope of sexual and reproductive health, White says, “they are entering into uncharted waters, but are excited to stand on their own and prove not only how capable CRCD is, but how capable Vietnam is.”
This state of flux has also turned out to be quite the learning opportunity for White: “I think it’s closer to what I will actually be experiencing at a real job.”
Her work in the transition has mainly focused on building up CRCD’s database of health statistics for the country and successful frameworks used in the past, so the consultancy will have the informational resources it needs to get to work. “For example, today I just built a situational analysis on aging in the country,” White says. She has also gathered statistics on sexual and reproductive health in the country, and is helping create an international internship program at CRCD, “everything from best practices for having an intern, and programming for them, all the way to accommodation resources.”
In this practicum, White says she is getting more than the usual hands-on experience with a project. Instead, her work in the mobile learning evaluation—continued with CRCD—goes alongside getting into the machinery of international public health work, from an organization’s launch to the time when it passes the torch.
“It’s a weird kind of transition,” White says, “but it’s been rewarding to see the end and the beginning at the same time.”
Lindsay White is taking over the SPH Instagram account from Hanoi, Vietnam, from July 11 through 15. Follow along at Instagram.com/BUSPH/.