MUSC nurse pursues global challenges with Indigenous Health International (IHI)

If you think sailing from Hawaii to San Francisco is tough, try establishing sustainable healthcare infrastructure in a politically autonomous and indigenous province in the Central American country of Panama. Natalia Davila has accomplished the former and is in progress to fulfill the latter. Although these are both daunting pursuits, she has thought very little of the difficulty involved. “I love working with people who gravitate towards these types of challenging opportunities, whether sailing or humanitarian work,” Davila said. “These people put experience and helping others above everything. They’re people who climb mountains to see the world, not for the world to see them.”

Davila is a pediatric nurse practitioner with a specialization in developmental pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina’s (MUSC) Children’s Care Clinic in North Charleston, SC. She received her baccalaureate and post-baccalaureate training in nursing at MUSC. “I love giving what I have to give, which is taking care of children. And to be able to share it is pretty cool,” said Davila. “My training and experience at MUSC helped prepare me for activities in the U.S. and abroad.”

Davila has been drawn to global health first through fieldwork, helping treat hydrocephalus in Tanzania, and most recently by traveling to Kuna Yala, Panama with Indigenous Health International (IHI). IHI is a non-profit medical mission operation created by MUSC physician Leonard Egede, M.D., M.S. to build capacity and sustainable health systems in low-resource settings across the globe. IHI’s mission is to establish self-sustaining health systems in predetermined locales in a five year period—an ambitious, but surmountable feat. Partnerships with the local and national governments have made this particular project relatively seamless in executing the objectives outlined by the group. “You have to be persistent in reaching out to people in these types of projects; it’s important to gain trust,” remarked Davila. “Simple things like Fanta soda help break down barriers of trust to be able to do the work we’ve enlisted ourselves to do.”

IHI is currently working to build health system capacity in Kuna Yala, Panama, an autonomous region in eastern Panama that also demarcates other areas of Central and South America. This region is so rural that Google Maps offers no estimation of how long it takes to reach the eastern coast near Kuna Yala by any means. Challenges abound for IHI in this particular region of Central America. The primary language spoken in Panama is Spanish whereas the people of the Kuna Yala region speak Tule, a language foreign to most visitors and comparable to many traditional Native American dialects.

Even more formidable are the cays—and other less habitable land formations—that the Kuna inhabit posing challenges for Natalia and her colleagues. The closest airport is in Panama City, a nearly five-hour drive to Kuna. This is just a glimpse into the difficulty of creating long-lasting programs in indigenous regions of the world. The tenacious, undeterred spirit of Egede, Davila, and their team is what’s needed to fulfill the goals and mission of IHI. “We got to meet with the governing body at the end of the trip and they thanked us for the help we provided them,” said Davila. “One of the most touching things they said to us was that they felt they had seen disease take a step backward since we arrived in Kuna, and that their people felt healthier.”

IHI is gearing up to implement its models of health system development in the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, and Kenya to work with marginalized populations in Africa. They hope by working in these regions they are able to provide a greater understanding of why it is important to use research dollars where diseases are novel but easily prevented. An argument can be made that Americans are rarely exposed to tropical disease, but in order to continue to stave off a disease’s advances, they must be treated and researched where they are, which in many cases can’t be found in the developed world.

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