PGY 3 Freda Ready, M.D., shares a story about an experience she had with the academic global surgery fellowship. Dr. Ready gave a grand rounds presentation about her experiences in September of last year.

It’s a sunny afternoon in Addis Ababa, and I’m staring at a plate of raw meat. One of the most famous pediatric surgeons in Africa is looking at me expectantly; he’s already assured me this Ethiopian delicacy is completely safe, but I’m having a hard time trusting him. You see, when I joined the Peace Corps back in 2005, my grandfather offered only one piece of advice: "Don’t eat any raw meat." Until now, that arbitrary piece of wisdom had seemed like just the rambling of a slightly racist old man whose antiquated vision of Africa was only matched by his equally fusty views on women’s rights. And yet here I was, trying to work up the courage to stick a bloody chunk of cow, a piece of meat that had clearly never even seen an open flame, into my mouth. It hadn’t exactly been well-refrigerated since its death, either.

The man sitting across from me is Dr. Miliard Derbew, an Ethiopian pediatric surgeon trained in Toronto and currently serving as president of the College of Surgeons of Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa (COSECSA), an organization that works to increase surgical capacity and training throughout the region. Dr. Derbew was my access point to all of Addis Ababa, the first person I met when I got off the plane, and the man the UTSW surgery department had entrusted with their resident for a year. He, in turn, entrusted me with complete access to his operating rooms, his data, and his surgical residents, who worked with me to put together research on the epidemiology of burns in the country, along with a large data set documenting the trends in pediatric surgery at Ethiopia’s only tertiary referral center. Through Dr. Derbew, I was also invited to the COSECSA conference in Mombassa, Kenya, and to help plan the first general meeting of the Pan-African Association of Surgeons held at the African Union in Addis.

Surgical residency is ultimately all about trust; the trust that we as residents have in the programs that take us from curious medical students to competent surgeons; the trust that attendings have in us to be extensions of themselves, work safely, and ask for help; and the trust that the programs have in us to make them proud at the end of five years (or six or seven for some).

Nowhere was I more reminded of that simple bargain that defines residency than in the eight months I spent in Ethiopia. UTSW trusted me enough to send me halfway around the world to a place with spotty cell phone service (and that’s on a good day). They trusted Dr. Derbew enough to keep me safe when political unrest gripped the country. Really, shouldn’t I trust him enough with my GI health?

And so, I ate the meat.

I was sick for a week.