Healthy Future Intervention in Rural China
About the author: Evelyn Zhang ’21 is an FSI Global Policy Intern at the West China School of Public Health at Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China. Evelyn is currently a Human Biology major at Stanford University.
The last 3 weeks have been CRAZY. The first 3 weeks of my internship in China was part of a separate program with the Stanford Rural Education Action Program (REAP), where students from all over the world work with REAP employees to do field research. I was in the Healthy Future project, an ongoing intervention REAP is developing to enhance the health of young babies in rural China. We went to northern Shaanxi and visited many rural villages and families, some of whom are featured in the pictures below. Our focus was to track migration patterns of rural village families, in order to better inform how and where the Healthy Future intervention should be implemented. Since this kind of study has never been done before, there was a lot of work to do, but it was really cool interviewing rural families, and we had some time to explore the area as well.
China is a beautiful and stimulating place, and I met so many cool people through my first 3 weeks here. While the rest of the summer will be a little different (I will still be working on Healthy Future, but now that the 3 week program is over, I am on my own working with Sichuan university on the project), I am so excited for the experiences to come!
