Columbia College Today

Demetri Blanas '07 has worked to get much-needed medical supplies and computers to a health clinic in Kédougou, Senegal, where he worked last year as part of his study abroad project. He most recently returned in January. From left to right, Bokar Diallo, the brother of the director of the School for International Training and Blanas' host while he was in Kédougou; Blanas; Famakan Dembele, a technician at the clinic; and Dr. Ndian, one of the head doctors at the clinic, in late August.

PHOTO: Philip Cartelli '06

As many students do during their junior year of college, Demetri Blanas ’07 decided to study abroad last spring, spending a semester in Senegal through the School for International Training (SIT) in affiliation with Columbia.

What made Blanas’ trip particularly interesting, however, was his special independent study project. Blanas studied the health conditions near a health center in Kédougou, a district in southeastern Senegal with approximately 116,000 inhabitants. “Kédougou is a 17-hour bush taxi ride of pothole-riddled roads from Dakar, the capital, and is considered [one of] the most remote and rural regions of Senegal,” Blanas says about his location of choice. “In this region, infant mortality rates hover around 140 per 1,000, malaria is endemic and malnutrition rates are considered the worst in the country.” Blanas spent more than a month carrying out his research, including two weeks observing the district health center and two weeks visiting nearby villages.

The idea for his project came to him when he first visited Kédougou on a trip with SIT. He spent two weeks in observance at the Centre de Santé — the health center — and made contact with its head doctor, Youssou Ndiaye. It was this time at the health center and witnessing the poverty of the surrounding rural areas of the region that motivated Blanas to select his research topic. “I am examining the ecological factors behind this poverty, and possible solutions,” he says, “particularly the sustainable exploitation of a valuable tree species, Pterocarpus erinaceus, that grows in this region of Senegal.”

Blanas stayed with a variety of hosts during his time in Senegal, including Peace Corps worker Kei Petersen (now a student at the School of Social Work) and the chief of the village of Boundou Coundi, Mamady Diallo, and his family. “They showed me unequalled kindness and hospitality,” Blanas says. “Of course, it was a novel experience for me, living in a straw hut without electricity or water for several weeks and living on one-course meals of only rice two times a day … Indeed, the more difficult period of my research was staying in the health center, where the workers were under considerable stress catering to a population with extremely poor basic health and with extremely limited resources.”

The end of his program period, however, was not the last that Blanas would see of Senegal. Astonished by the “social injustice and conditions of extreme inequality in the world” and compelled to return the generosity and hospitality that he had experienced in the district, Blanas made plans to return to Kédougou. He began summer classes at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine as a student in its Humanities and Medicine Early Acceptance Program, a highly selective alternative to the traditional pre-medicine track that accepts students during their sophomore year and ensures acceptance into the medical school after completing an undergraduate education and the summer session. While there, he discovered Mount Sinai Remedy, a student-run organization that collects medical supplies that would otherwise be discarded and sends them to clinics and hospitals in developing countries. Thanks to the organization, Blanas was able to obtain three boxes of supplies explicitly needed by doctors at the Kédougou health clinic, including surgical equipment, plastic gloves, bandages, sutures and two computers. Through a grant from Columbia’s Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology Department, Blanas was able to return to Senegal in August to continue his thesis research and deliver the medical supplies.

Blanas is a Denver native but also has lived in France where his parents, both high school French teachers, went on sabbatical, and in Germany as an exchange student in high school. He is a double-major in comparative literature and society and ecology, evolution and environmental biology. On campus, Blanas has been involved with numerous activities, including the African languages program, tutoring at the Double Discovery Center and coordinating the PubliColor volunteer group through Community Impact.

Currently Blanas is completing research for his senior thesis, a continuation of his research focused on the ecological factors behind poverty in the Kédougou region. He will return to Senegal to finish his research and bring more medical supplies donated from Project C.U.R.E. (Commission on Urgent Relief and Equipment), a non-governmental organization based in Colorado, in March. He also will present part of his research in Texas at the Conference for the Undergraduate Research Award for the Forum for Education Abroad the same month.

Blanas plans to defer Mount Sinai for a year. Instead of starting medical school right away, he will return to Kédougou this summer and work the entire year with Ndiaye on a voluntary basis. Blanas will help set up a new health clinic in the most isolated area of the district and is looking for grants and funding on Ndiaye’s behalf. “[Dr. Ndiaye] also plans to launch an HIV testing and treatment campaign in the region,” says Blanas, “as well as a study on causes of maternal mortality, which are [about] 87 deaths per 100,000 live births (compared to about six deaths per live births in the United States).”

When asked to name the single most important thing he’s taken from his experience in Senegal, however, Blanas comments on the gradual realization he made about the way of life among the Kédougou villagers. “The more time I spent in the villages,” he says, “the more I realized that, despite [their living conditions], the vast majority of the villagers are happy. Among other things, the villagers rely on extended family structures that are also rooted in rich cultural traditions … I also realized that, in many ways, these communal systems of support are largely absent in our relatively ‘healthy’ American society.”

Blanas concludes that, as much as the villagers have benefited from any improvement modern medicine could bring, he has just as much to gain by learning from them. “I do want to pursue medicine — health is a fundamental and essential human need,” Blanas says. “However, after my stay in Senegal, I will begin my medical career as a means to access and appreciate other cultures and ways of living, rather than an end in itself.”

Maryam Parhizkar ’09 is a native Texan majoring in English. She is an avid writer and classical musician.

AROUND THE QUADS

Keeping Ties with Kédougou

Demetri Blanas ’07 studies and works to improve conditions near health center in Senegal