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Welcome to the online world of PittMAP -- University of Pittsburgh’s Multi-regional Academic Program. We invite you to join us in a globalstudy tour examining public health issues in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cape Town, South Africa; and Beijing, China. Three faculty members, 22 students and a student advisor will spend five weeks in each city, attending classes, visiting clinics, hospitals and research centers, meeting with people in the business and medical communities as part of a curriculum focused on global health and the global economy, with special attention to HIV/AIDS. And, in our spare time, we plan to learn what we can from three of the world’s historically great cities. The faculty are Peter Veldkamp (School of Medicine), Svitlana Maksymenko (Economics) and David Bartholomae (English). The student advisor is Lauren Scott (GSPIA). The students are drawn from a variety of academic programs. You’ll learn more about them and their discoveries in the weeks and months ahead. |
Around the World in 120 Days
I am writing this final posting in Pittsburgh. What an amazing semester! (I’m still buzzing with all that we learned, all that we saw, and all that we did.) And I’m grateful to everyone who helped to make this trip such a success—our 22 remarkable students (brave, funny, smart, eloquent and resourceful); my colleagues (Peter Veldkamp, Svitlana Maksymenko, Joyce Bartholomae, and Lauren Scott); and the faculty and staff at Pitt who created and who manage this remarkable program (with a special nod to Vanessa Sterling and Nancy Condee).
The PittMAP concept is brilliant. Provide a focused curriculum to insure that the trip is truly a study trip. In our case, we were studying issues, research, and practices relating to Global Health, with particular attention to infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS. And put the group on the ground long enough that they can become more than tourists. With five weeks in each city, we got to know people and neighborhoods. The students could follow their interests in politics, sports, culture and the arts; they found soccer games, fencing matches, running trails, museums, jazz clubs, and concert venues. They made friends, some of the them lasting friends, and partied with students from every corner of the globe. Over the course of our 120 days, we were offered a rare and precious opportunity to enter into the life and rhythm of three of the world’s great cities: Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and Beijing.
The long line of blog posts preceding this one has told the story of our travels. The images in this posting show our three campuses: the University of Belgrano (in Buenos Aires), the University of Cape Town (the medical school campus), and Capital Normal University in Beijing. So much of what we learned, however, we learned off campus, in the cities, through excursions (or field work) enabled by our local support groups. We visited hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical laboratories and biological research centers; we met with government agencies, physicians, nurses, and public health officials. And we hit some tourist stops along the way. We visited Iguazu Falls, climbed Table Mountain, and walked a piece of China’s great wall.
The highlights for me include a visit to the cattle market in Buenos Aires (the Mercado de Liniers), the opportunity to eavesdrop on a meeting of regional public health officials at the Ministerio de Salud, and an afternoon visit with Malena Araneo, a young woman who works for the World Bank and who provided, I think, a way for our students to imagine themselves working in a global environment. In South Africa we visited one of Cape Town’s historic black townships, Langa. The poverty was staggering; the living conditions unforgettable. And later in the visit we had a presentation from a young, black PhD student in economics, Cecil Mlathsheni, who grew up in a township, who is affiliated with the South African Labour and Development Research Unit, and whose research considers poverty and unemployment in the townships, including the one we visited. We had a presentation by Stavros Nicolaou, a senior executive from Aspen Pharmaceuticals, telling the remarkable story of his successful struggle to bring affordable ARV drugs to South Africa. Our students attended lectures with 2nd year medical students.
In Beijing, we visited an organic farm on the outskirts of the city, toured studios and galleries of China’s contemporary art scene, met with the former director of the Chinese version of our CDC, and watched while one of our own, Kerri Bell, received acupuncture as part of a presentation at Guanganmen, a hospital that features traditional Chinese medicine. None of us will forget the pharmacy in the hospital’s basement, where medicinal potions are concocted from herbs and roots and things that creep and crawl and fly. White coated lab assistants worked at long wooden tables in a room with a thousand drawers. We entered a laboratory with steamers and pressure cookers and ran up against a wall of pungent smells. 
I’ve been working with undergraduates since 1973. This was by far the most memorable and important and productive semester of my teaching career. I’ve very grateful to have been a part of PittMAP. To our readers: please help spread the word. There will be new PittMAP groups forming every spring semester—each with a different faculty, a different focus, and a different itinerary. The program provides a once in a lifetime opportunity and you can find it through the Study Abroad Office at Pitt.
Yet, our life abroad was not about dining at McDonalds’ restaurants. Out of curiosity, I asked students in my economics courses to monitor prices of selected goods and services in Argentina, South Africa, and China, compare them with US prices, and then report on the cost of living abroad. The exchange rates that prevailed in Argentina, South Africa and China during our visit were 4 pesos, 7 rand, and 6.5 yuan per dollar, respectively. The choice of the goods was left entirely to the students. The only restriction was that the goods were to be consistent from place to place, or as close as possible to being identical, in order to reasonably compare prices. I was surprised how diverse the basket of goods and services ended up. Towels, shampoos, postcards, chocolate bars, cell phones, tampons, condoms, 12-inch pizzas, latte, cigarettes, haircuts, metro rides, movie tickets, and many more.
We had a chance to observe this combination for ourselves at the Guanganmen Traditional Chinese Hospital. At first glance, Guanganmen seemed much like the F.J. Muñiz Municipal Hospital we visited in Buenos Aires. Outside, a sign points visitors towards the Hepatitis Clinic, the Inpatient Department, and the Enteric Infection Clinic. Nurses and doctors in their official white coats do rounds, while patients wait in rows of blue plastic chairs—an ordinary day in a modern hospital.
We entered the pharmacy, where we observed the technicians blending together dozens of herbs, flowers, dried scorpions and centipedes, fruits and nuts. And we visited the decoction center, a large laboratory filled with pressure cookers, beakers and sinks. Here the mixtures were decocted into a murky brown tea and packaged in plastic bags, each with a patient’s name attached. 