During my fellowship year, I designed two primary research projects: one epidemiological study looking at cervical cancer survival rates at the Peruvian National Cancer Institute and the other an offshoot of a community-based prevention project for human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections. The prevention project was taking place in communities around Peru, targeting both the general population and specific vulnerable groups, including female and male commercial sex workers. Early in my fellowship year I had the opportunity to travel and participate in the project in the Andean and Amazonian regions of Peru, where the resources were scarcer than in Lima but the communities smaller and tighter. I had grown up and lived mostly in small cities or metropolitan areas, and these trips opened my eyes to the realities of poverty in more isolated parts of the world. In many ways these regions were reminiscent of my parents’ native Guyana, which is also largely impoverished and shares borders on the Amazon. I was eager to see and learn as much as I could during that year.

Despite 4 months of gastrointestinal upset that accompanied my initial stay in Peru and earned me the nickname “Typhoid Christina,” I was in a global-health-minded-medical-student’s paradise. Public health fieldwork and research in South America is what I had aspired to do since my undergraduate years, and I was finally there for a solid stretch of time. Back in Lima, I began working in a clinic that served sex workers at a community health center in Callao, a port city adjoining the sprawling metropolis of Lima. Callao for me was a city of contrasts, being both an epicenter for Afro-Peruvian salsa dancing and a neighborhood that had seen better days, now characterized by row after row of abandoned warehouses. Often taxi drivers would not want to take me to the health center, claiming the neighborhood was too peligroso (dangerous). If I couldn’t find a cab, I would take the Kombi, an old, often dilapidated Volkswagen van painted a unique style and combination of colors to designate the route, and blasting salsa or reggaeton music along the way. Whereas the taxi would cost about 5 US dollars, the Kombi charged about 15 cents to go from the closest Lima neighborhood to the neighborhood where the health center was located. My expat colleagues warned me not to take the bus and walk through the neighborhood alone, due to the frequent crime that occurred in close proximity to the health center. Being a morena (brown) gringa, I took my chances and fortunately was safe during these trips (I later ended up getting mugged when I was alone in a taxi in another part of Lima).