I traveled to England in 2013 to attend the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where I completed a Diploma in Tropical Nursing. To this day, I suspect I learned more during those few intense months than I did during much of nursing school itself—though perhaps it's best not to tell my former professors that.
At the time, I was continuing to build my skills and knowledge as I prepared for a career in global health and humanitarian work, and the curriculum reflected that reality. We studied everything from Tuberculosis to Schistosomiasis. I learned to diagnose Malaria and TB under the microscope, staining slides and culturing specimens in agar-filled petri dishes. For someone fascinated by infectious disease, this was an academic paradise. I wish I could have stayed and enrolled in everything they had to offer.
The school itself only added to the experience. Housed in a historic brick building, its upper floors contained enormous glass jars filled with preserved parasites—the Helminthic worms were alarmingly large—and a securely locked section housing highly venomous snakes used for research and teaching. It felt part museum, part laboratory, and entirely unlike anywhere I had studied before.
I was fortunate to stay with a former physiotherapy colleague from my time in Ethiopia who was living in Liverpool. She introduced me to a number of British customs, including the nightly ritual of a strong cup of black tea before bed. She also sent me to the grocery store one evening to buy chicken, where I found myself staring at birds that seemed impossibly small. It was one of the first times I seriously considered how differently food is produced around the world—and how much we take for granted about our own systems back home.
Liverpool served as my base throughout my studies, though I also managed to explore a bit of the Cotswolds and, of course, London. These photographs come from that season of learning—a time when the world of tropical medicine was opening up before me and when my path into humanitarian work was beginning to take shape (photos of parasites and venomous snakes not included).
