After three weeks in Franklin,
I’ve realized I’m in that exact situation.
Just to give you a bit of context… Last Tuesday, Josh (the other Tulane
student living and working here in Fraklin) and I were invited to attend the
Rotary Club meeting. The Rotary Club
commonly has guests and visitors from out of town. But rarely do they have two
new, young future doctors move into Franklin to live there for nine
months. They asked Josh and I to speak
about ourselves, the TRIP Program, our time at Tulane, and our future
careers. We did just that, plus answered
their questions about our experiences with Rural Poverty and our opinions on
“Obamacare”. Unbeknownst to us, we were
being videotaped. After our presentation
Mr. Robinson, the owner of the local television station and co-host of Teche
Talk, the local morning talk show, asked if he could feature us on the show the
next morning. Since then, I’ve met
countless people in Franklin that happily shake my hand to tell me they saw me
on TV and that they’re so happy to have a Tulane medical student here in
Franklin. My favorite was the woman at
the Nursing Home that called me over and with a sweet grin on her face asked
me, “Didn’t I see you on TV this morning?” Turns out small town morning talk
shows are quite popular…where else can you hear who’s died, who got married,
upcoming events AND the school lunch menu?
Needless to say, I now have even
more motivation to keep working to bring about some type of positive change in
Franklin. I can dutifully work every day
in the clinic and the hospital, seeing patients and adjusting their
medications. And I can spend my free
time studying, running, and relaxing along the bayou. But in addition, I can challenge myself to
becoming a force of change, a positive new energy in small town Franklin. I can use the skills I learned in my Public
Health education and practice the lessons I took away from my time in Chile and
Kenya. I can work with the
wonderful people of Franklin that are excited to have me in town to make some
positive impacts in the lives of my patients and perhaps the entire community
in some small way. This is why I wanted
to do TRIP in the first place right? To become an active, invested member of a
small community? To use my unique talents and skills to bring joy, light, and
hope into the world?
Seen
cynically, perhaps I’m suffering from the Big-Fish-in-a-Little-Pond
Effect. But I like to think that I’m in
a manageable situation with Kayla-sized problems that I can help address. I can’t help but continually see similarities
between Franklin and Karungu, Kenya (where I volunteered for 8 months before medical school...see kaylainkenya.blogspot.com) Both places filled beautiful people in a beautiful place doing
beautiful things and with beautiful potential.
My only prayer now is that I find the courage
and strength to keep acting with great love, to continue taking these small
steps. I know I’m not going to leave
Franklin in 8 more months with every Diabetic patient with a HbA1c under 7%,
every obese person with a BMI down to 26, and every smoker having thrown out
their last pack. But I can work with
local people using local resources to address local problems. So I’ll get back to reading up on what’s been
done in other communities, what’s been shown to work, and what I can do to
continue acting with great love.
**Attention: this blog post was written mainly as a method
of Self-Motivation. Thank you for
bearing with this therapeutic effort.
Stay tuned for updates on the coming results of the motivation derived
from this Blog Post. J**
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