Profiles
Amber Pearson: Finding the Global Self
Geography graduate student Amber Pearson started out with an interest in earth science and ecology and "getting her hands in the dirt." Somewhere along the line, she added a focus on people to the equation.
When she was 16 years old, Pearson accompanied a dentist to Honduras as a volunteer. There, she observed people riding donkeys for days to reach the clinic site and then waiting in line for hours to have their teeth pulled—begging at times to have all of their teeth removed to alleviate constant pain. The experience—seeing poverty firsthand and the consequences of lack of access to health care—was eye opening.
Later, in college, Pearson went to Ghana, working at the epicenter of an outbreak of Burundi ulcer, a debilitating disease from the family of bacteria that causes tuberculosis and leprosy. Buruli ulcer has received less attention than these diseases, yet often results in bone infection and, ultimately, amputation. Pearson says, "These are really rural communities where people rely on manual labor." Disfigurement and amputation are devastating. Pearson mapped activity spaces of patients and identified that the water bodies that patients were using for cash-crop farming were contaminated with mercury from gold mining.
Today, Pearson is a doctoral student in the UW Department of Geography, working with Jonathan Mayer, professor of geography and epidemiology, and others. Her interest in medical geography and in working to improve global health is cemented. She received a travel grant last summer from Puget Sound Partners for Global Health to perform a bacterial assessment of drinking water sources in pastoralist communities of Southwest Uganda. She says, "Ninety percent of water sources are surface water in these communities. When land was privatized, everyone dug their own water body on their property for their family and cows. To gather rain water, they put the water body in at the lowest point, so everything drains into it."
Pearson plans to return to do field work related to water contamination and diarrheal disease reduction for her doctoral dissertation. Later, doctorate in hand, she intends to pursue international work with a health agency. Prevention, she says, is as essential as treatment. Public health and medicine can work together: physicians can instill prevention while treating patients and public health workers can recommend treatment for people in the communities in which they work. Ultimately, she says, both public health and medicine depend on sustainable change at the political level for meaningful long-term change. All global change, she notes, depends on finding commonalities and the need for connection—and these in turn bolster compassion.
Interview by Marjorie Wenrich
