I am an experienced health professional, a Human Rights activist and a certified professional counselor who loves to use her privilege to be the voice for the voiceless and serve the underserved. Moreover, I hold a Bachelors degree of sciences with honor in pharmacy, and I am currently pursuing my master’s degree in Sexual Reproductive health and rights at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
My bottom-line while growing up was impacting people’s lives. Surprisingly, The only way I thought I would do it was through wearing a white coat; studying pharmacy in order to manufacture medicines, dispense and give deep counseling to people in need. I wasn’t wrong at all because my daily experience in different health settings ranging from Hospitals, community pharmacies showed me that I was in the right direction. However, I felt I wasn’t reaching the peak impact owing to the fact that this was one to one person, and yet I was zealous to impact as many people as possible especially the most vulnerable, and underserved populations varying from Key populations, LGBTIQ, people who injects drugs, as well as adolescent girls and young women.
A quick reflection of my career in the community work at Health Development Initiative. I started as a project officer implementing projects on HIV prevention in 15 districts with over 10,000 of beneficiaries ranging from sex-workers and their clients, men having sex with other men over a period of 10 months. It was quite impressive how in such a period of 10 months, I would have been able to impact directly and indirectly 10,000 key populations by linking them to the health care service related to reproductive health and rights; family planning, HIV testing and treatment, STIs screening and treatment through 37 health centers.
My dreams were coming to reality. Ten months later, I was given an opportunity to serve as an Associate Director of the community outreach where I was managing 6 projects ranging from Disseminating the ministerial order on safe abortion information and services, strengthening access to HIV prevention, care and treatments services to Key populations, Promoting community development. Therefore, Through engaging key decision makers; Civil society organizations, district officials, health care providers, security organs, women and youth councils I was able to reach out more than 50,000 people in all the 30 districts of the country.
They say “Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation”. Ten months later, I was entrusted to be the Director of the center for Health and Rights. Moreover, the opportunities provided by this position is amazingly indescribable. “The higher you climb the better the view they say’’, since I was brought to both National and regional platforms, my dream of impacting as many people as possible came true. For instance, I have not only been part of the Regional Technical working group that advanced and worked on the East-Africa Community HIV and Sexual reproductive bills but also I have been part of the movement that advanced critical and most affecting issues like decriminalizing same sex relationships, sex-work, safe abortion under five categories.
Despite all the tremendous achievements throughout my career as a Sexual reproductive health and rights activist, I can’t exclude the fact that I encountered a lot of challenges due to the nature of my work in the Rwandan context. For instance, talking about issues around sexuality in a country that still have the majority thinking sexuality as a taboo, working with a certain target group that is still stigmatized and discriminated wasn’t an easy feat. For instance, I was working closely with sex-workers on one of the project I was implementing to contribute in the reduction of new HIV cases; the issue here was that I would experience stigma as someone promoting sex work or be associated with my beneficiaries.
To get to grips with this, I reminded myself my bottom line in life” Impacting people’s lives” and be in a position to influence policy. There was no way I would do this without getting accurate information from the field by working closely with the vulnerable people in question to get to know the nature of the challenges they are grappling with and this kept me moving.
Dear Young Pharmacist, albeit the steep learning curve:
- Follow your passion because it makes your life worth living and money will follow.
- Working in a job you hate makes your day go slowly, again follow your passion.
- The best investment one can do is investing in self, so invest in your learning to be on cutting edge of society’s direction.
- It’s better to have an impossible dream than no dream at all. Therefore, Dream big!
In the words of the wise: ‘Pursue Excellence, success will chase you’..
MISS EMERY JOCELYNE INGABIRE