To Be a Good Steward: Strengthening Systems for Healthier Women and Communities

After my first year of college, I traveled to South Africa with a group of friends to volunteer in the townships of Johannesburg. On our way from one settlement to another, I met a young woman about my age sitting on the side of the road. We had a brief conversation in which she shared with me some of the harrowing details of why she was there and not able to be safely at home with her family.

While I struggled at the time to find something to say, I was feeling many things. I felt powerless because I didn’t know what to say to her and because I knew larger systems of oppression were behind her health crises and those of many other women and girls. I felt shame from the stark contrast of our circumstances, knowing they had little to do with our own merit or worth and everything to do with larger social circumstances over which neither of us have control.

By empowering local community members and politicians to work together in constructive ways, this project can help improve the overall quality of Uganda’s rural healthcare.

More than anything, I felt a sense of responsibility—that I needed somehow to become a better steward of the privileges I had been given.

This poignant encounter in South Africa has stayed with me not only because of the details of human suffering but because such stories are all too common, especially for those who are made vulnerable by the contexts of subjugation that pervade our communities. The story reminds me how difficult life is for so many of us, and that awareness motivates me to remain focused on the community health engagement work I conduct as a researcher.

A Bedside Steward Moves into Research

I was born in South Korea and, due to my parents' jobs, had moved more than twenty times before graduating high school—between seven countries, attending twelve different schools, and using three different languages in class. Throughout this time, I was observing how I was perceived and treated, especially as a woman.

My experiences in South Africa were part of a larger process of career discernment for me. I had already committed to nursing and art majors, two fields that can tangibly, practically touch people’s lives. During senior-year clinical rotations—with my experiences from South Africa and many other contexts in my heart and on my mind—I began to study in more depth the systemic, structural, and policy-level issues that contribute in every way to human illness and health.

As much as I had loved working closely with patients, I realized that working as a bedside nurse would no longer be my path. I became involved with nursing research, focusing on women’s health in minority populations. I joined a research team working with local, low-income women on basic menstrual, contraceptive, and other reproductive education. And I worked on a pilot project educating women in underserved communities about coping mechanisms for depression and anxiety.

As a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Nursing, I worked on improving access to reproductive health services. In my focus region—rural areas of the central African country of Zambia—I learned that many pregnant women there do not have basic financial means, not even enough to secure transportation to a clinic, pay for basic medications, and purchase baby clothes. Even in financially stable families, husbands control family resources and often will not prioritize expenses related to pregnancy and childbirth.

Women are painfully aware of the privileges we do and do not have. With the privileges I have, I am choosing to move through my research career with a sense of stewardship and responsibility.

As an Impact Scholar with the Center for Global Health Equity, I work on an interdisciplinary research team pursuing novel health governance approaches in Uganda. We facilitate regular meetings between community members and politicians where community members express health care needs and politicians share policy plans and progress. We train politicians on how to monitor and supervise the implementation of research and community information. The primary goal of the project is ensuring clinics in rural areas have the medication, equipment, and trained staff whenever and wherever men, women, and children need them. And we believe that, by empowering local community members and politicians to work together in constructive ways, this project can help improve the overall quality of Uganda’s rural healthcare.

Research with Hope

When asked about my passion for research, I share how hopeful I remain that good research and evidence-based policy can help women around the world better protect and promote their own health and the health of the systems and cultures around them, including their own family. In valuing women and their health, all people and communities have a better chance at living up to their potential.

Women are painfully aware of the privileges we do and do not have. With the privileges I have, I am choosing to move through my research career with a sense of stewardship and responsibility.

It has been almost a decade since I sat down with the young woman in South Africa. She was kind and generous to share her story with a stranger. Sadly, her story is far too common.

But I live in hope. I do not yet know, fully, what kind of life I must live to say I was a good steward of all I’ve been given. I do know that, compared to ten years ago, today I feel more empowered, less ashamed, and extremely motivated to help women and their communities be their fullest, healthiest selves.

My research will continue to address the larger schemes of empowering women and changing our social contexts so that we value women and their health more in all the decisions we make.

Photo above. Lee with Sister Dr. Priscilla Busingye—obstetrician and gynecologist and fistula surgeon at Saint Francis Hospital in Nsambya, Uganda—on a site visit to a camp that provides free postpartum surgical procedures