Transience and the Lives Therein (original) (raw)

Abstract

This thesis explores the way people engage with, depend on and live through transient global health interventions in Kono District, Sierra Leone. In a country that is often cast as in a constant state of health emergency by global health organizations and practitioners, I attempt to capture the realities of living with its burden of disease, and the ways in which people do not suffer passively but actively make their circumstances livable. Drawing on three years of ethnographic experience both in Sierra Leone and in the United States as a volunteer with “Ichende International,” a global health organization, I relate Ichende’s history and contextualize its recent maternal and child health project as a result of evolving ties with major global health institutions (such as Partners in Health) and broad trends in global public health. I describe the project’s unfolding in a landscape of care and healers: biomedical, “traditional,” local and transnational. While humanitarian global health projects come and go in their communities, I show how people actively “cope” and “make-do” with their illnesses, and the ways local healers enable this living-on. I argue that traditional medicine in Sierra Leone should be appreciated for its effects: as a type of palliation—and I conclude that this is an egregiously neglected field in global health. I end with a call for the field of global health to attend to, and respond to, this conflicted reality and the lives therein.

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