Hi!! My name is Emily, and I’m working in Ethiopia this summer on an internship with Rice BTB. The internship is part of a big partnership between Rice, Texas Children’s Hospital, Tegbare-id University, Jimma University (both in Ethiopia), and the AIHA. The developing world receives a lot of donated medical equipment, but much of it is in disrepair. If a device has any problems it is essentially useless, as trained device technicians are few and far between. Our goal is to develop a curriculum to train medical device technicians at the two Ethiopian universities. This is where we come in! For this curriculum to be as effective as possible, we need to know which devices are in the hospitals, which ones are most commonly broken, and how are they broken. We will be taking inventory of medical devices at two hospitals in Ethiopia, Zewditu and Ras Desta. Professors at Rice, Tegbare-id and Jimma will use this information to design lessons to teach the students the skills they will need the most!
Another intern, Melody Tan, and I will be in the capital city, Addis Ababa, for seven weeks working on this inventory. We have teammates in Jimma, Matt and Emily, working on the same project at different hospitals. They’re all kind of amazing!

I’m really excited about this project because it is working to treat one of the root causes of health disparities in the developing world. This medical equipment is a huge untapped resource that would make a big difference in the hospitals’ capacity to treat people. Keep checking in to see how it’s all going, and to hear about Melody and my adventures in Addis!