Changemaker Catalyst recipient Megumi Asaba to attend the 34th Congress of Japan Association for International Health to present her research findings, on innovative interventional tools developed to improve maternal and child health through empowering under-served mothers in Afghanistan. Megumi is a doctoral student in the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, class of 2021.
My trip back to Japan this winter was an experience that put everything that I have been working on into perspective. The purpose of my trip, which was funded by Taylor Center, was primarily to present my research at a conference, but the most important thing I gained from this trip was what I learned outside the conference.
I gave a presentation of my research titled “MCH Handbook as a home-based record option for poor mothers and children in Afghanistan” at The 34th Congress of Japan Association for International Health. This presentation summarized the project outcome and research findings from Japan International Cooperation Agency’s (JICA) project, “Launching MCH Handbook in Afghanistan,” in which I took part while working for JICA Afghanistan Office before I enrolled at Tulane University. The presentation was successful, followed by an active post-presentation discussion.
After the presentation, I took advantage of the trip to Japan and visited my old home JICA HQ. There, I was able to reconnect with my former colleagues with whom I worked in Afghanistan and who are still thriving to improve the lives of people and bring peace in the country. The timing of this reunion felt right too, as our colleague and my hero who inspired me to pursue my career in international health and development, Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, was brutally killed in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, on the day I arrived in Japan. Dr. Nakamura was the very person who embodied JICA’s spirit, “improve lives of people and bring peace,” devoting his life to meeting bare minimal needs of people suffering from prolonged drought by greening the deserted area in Afghanistan. (Link to a video of Dr. Nakamura’s work: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/5001150/)
Memorizing him and talking to my colleagues made me realize how further away I got from the field and my original intent to come to Tulane: to become a researcher who can contribute to peace building by improving the health services through researches. In the process of getting used to academic life in New Orleans, I started to be obsessed with blameless research design, robust analytic methods and noble findings that can change the world. In other words, I started to see the world through a research-oriented perspective, and lost sight of the people who I wanted to serve and work with there. Therefore, I missed out a very important preliminary finding, which suggests a possibility to improve training curricula for health providers to better fit the needs of Afghan mothers, and one of my colleagues pointed it out when I told her that the finding was too small to make a difference, and that it’s outside my research scope, while I was complaining about the data quality.
Contrary to my expectation that I would receive helpful feedback and input from experts at the conference to sophisticate my research plan, I gained a valuable opportunity to get insight into how to make my research more practical and useful. Don’t get me wrong: I can’t stress strongly enough the importance of all the experiences and research skills I gained through the academic training at Tulane. It was, however, invaluable for me that I was reminded of the passion that led me into this path in the first place, at the right moment in my academic life. With this experience, I’m fully motivated to seek a better research plan that has a potential to improve the field operation and thus contribute to improved health outcomes in the long run, by synthesizing what I have learned both inside and outside the classroom, without losing sight of the faces of the people who work in the field, and more than that, those who live their daily lives there.