Losmeiya and The Astarte Project

This past year a good friend of mine, Losmeiya Huang, interned at John Snow Inc, a public health organization. She is currently a senior at Stanford University majoring in Human Biology but spent her junior year spring quarter and summer in Washington D.C. at The John Snow Research and Training Institute focusing on Reproductive Health for Refugees.

She spent a week in Sierra Leone over the summer visiting with The Astarte Project, a nonprofit that enhances access to quality reproductive health services by building leaders in communities affected by crisis. Losmeiya REALLY wanted to go and actually spent a week there by herself doing work with Astarte. Now, she looks exactly like me – petite, Asian, non-threatening looking – so staying safe was obviously an issue. But she was fine, had an amazing time there, and I’m sure will be going back again. I wouldn’t be surprised if she dragged me there with her.

Losmeiya wrote a short essay describing her experience -

“One of the most important things I learned about poverty isn’t just that people are hungry or homeless. It’s that they when they are poor, they become no one.  To the world looking in, the images of starving children covered in soot aren’t realities, but identities. For the past 6 months I had a chance realize the fallacy of that belief and the damage believing it can cause. As an intern work at John Snow, I worked on the Astarte Project, which partners with local NGO leaders in Liberia and Sierra Leone to increase reproductive health services to their communities. We sought out leaders who want to change their health systems and support them through small grants, skills trainings, and networking workshops.

Reproductive health is a crucial, but often neglected part of being healthy. Given that 75% of the world’s poor are women, providing adequate maternal care, education on sexually transmitted infections, choice on when to have children are crucial to alleviating poverty. However, in my work on Astarte, I discovered that such services are forgotten when many international actors and governments help to relieve and rebuild countries afflicted by natural disasters or civil wars.

Part of my internship took me to Sierra Leone itself, where I met women and men who shared with me their visions for improving reproductive health services in their country. It was there, smelling the cassava in the markets of Freetown, shaking the hands of internet café managers, seeing the curiosity of two-year-olds, and listening to people speak of their hopes and fears that I realized we’re not that different. So then why do I get a chance to be healthy, but not them?

To me, the wonders of a woman are infinite if we only give her a chance. So much of who I am today are not my own doing, but because I have parents who give me the resources to be healthy, teachers who invest in my educational success, mentors who guide my decisions. A girl in Sierra Leone is not just hungry for food, but for opportunities to use and develop the talents she already posses.  Astarte was my gateway into understanding what it means to be a woman myself, and how my identity can contribute to alleviating poverty so that no one has to feel like a nobody.”