Medical students: privilege faced with poverty.

Abstract

Growing up rich in poverty-stricken Malawi, I wanted for nothing. A white female, I was unhindered by lack of money, lack of education, language barriers, violence, poor health, gender, ethnicity, or religion, and I was somewhat aware of this privilege. I attended excellent schools, was loved by my family, and, as the crowning jewel of my secondary education, attained a place at a British medical school where I was confronted with and shocked by poverty in the UK. I sought to understand inequality here, where it seemed there was the means for universal prosperity. This took me to prisons, brothels, centres for impoverished families, and onto kerbstones with the homeless. In prison, I met torturers and murderers, but never someone whose story didn’t make sense. I wonder if I had grown up sexually abused in a care home, with a father who ‘taught me to box’ before I could walk, whether I too would join a gang, or …