I spent the summer in Hanoi, Vietnam, working for Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). My time was divided between two main projects, a post abortion care (PAC) project and a care and support for people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) project. Vietnam has the highest abortion rate of any developing country and very low contraceptive use rates. The PAC project was designed to train health workers to conduct safer abortions and to connect abortion services with family planning counseling so that the contact with women seeking abortion services includes a family planning counseling session.

I spent one week in Thanh Hoa province where the project is being implemented, meeting with the health workers to develop evaluation indicators for the project and attending the needs assessment dissemination workshop. Back in the Hanoi office I developed the family planning portion of the PAC manual and training curriculum.

The Care and Support for PLWHA project had me traveling around Hanoi to meet with representatives from International Organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Save the Children, CARE, World Vision and various local NGOs to interview them about their projects and materials for PLWHA. I also worked with a colleague at PATH to interview HIV positive individuals to begin the process of determining their needs.

One of the most difficult yet inspiring moments in my internship came when we traveled to Haiphong to meet with an HIV positive woman, her husband who is an AIDS patient and her HIV positive three-year-old son. Listening to this mother describe all of her fruitless efforts to find help for her family and the dearth of information available, and then watching her hungrily read our information booklets symbolized my reasons for going into international public health - bringing health care and information to the people who need it.

On a personal level, this internship was an opportunity to share my love of different cultures with my family, particularly my two small children, and to see how they might adjust to living outside the US. PATH provided us with a small apartment where my kids could play with our landlady's daughter. During the week, my husband took the kids to museums and cultural sites around Hanoi. On the weekends we were able to take short trips, one to Halong Bay to see the beautiful limestone islands and caves and another to Sapa, in the mountains near the Chinese border, to hike around terraced rice paddies and Hmong ethnic villages.