After graduating in 2011, Huda participated as a Health Career Connection intern at Kaiser Permanente’s Regional Health Education, working on domestic health education projects that focused on cultural competency and outreach. Following this experience, she pursued her interests in global health by participating in a project with the World Health Organization in Cairo, Egypt doing research on community based initiatives. After 6 months, she returned to the US to complete Kaiser Family Foundation’s Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholars program in Washington D.C. and engage in education and outreach around the ACA and health advocacy.
After this range of work experiences she decided to attend the London School of Economics, and graduated in December 2013 with a MSc in Health and Community Development from the Institute of Social Psychology. Here she continued to study health perception and trauma through a social psychological lens. Huda writes: My journey has been influenced positively by my experience in ISF, where my spectrum of interests and curiosities could come together and articulate a greater message of learning and thinking outside the box.
Huda provides this abstract of her thesis “Where There is a Well There is a Way: Water Acquisition in Rural Eritrea”:
In Eritrea, there is a water problem that involves questions of access, sanitation, and health. The purpose of this project is to better understand water acquisition in rural villages and towns in Eritrea and observe how this process affects perceptions of health. Using participant-observation, ethnography, and interviews, I disucss the connection between health disparities and socio-economic conditions. Findings reveal that there is a general relationship between health and the water acquisition process. This data calls to question the implementation of international development goals by major institutions and supports policies that prioritize water as a means to addressing them.
