Overcoming the Challenges of a Virtual GROW Experience
“We had to go back to the drawing board.”
That was the situation the GlobeMed at the University of California, Los Angeles GrassRoots On-site/Online Work (GROW) team, led by GROW Coordinator Ashley Tran, was in right before their 2021 internship with their partner organization was due to start.
The team had been planning to spend their internship with Mpoma Community HIV/AIDS Initiative (MCHI) organizing water access, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) groups and creating curriculum for MCHI’s primary school. But when Uganda’s COVID-19 lockdown happened, the primary school closed, and UCLA’s GROW team had to completely change their plans at the last minute. “The school closed, the office closed, everybody went home, and even our plans for virtual classes, virtual meetings, weren’t possible anymore,” Ashley recalls.
The team connected with Uncle Peter, the programs manager at MCHI, to brainstorm new GROW projects based on what MCHI needed most during lockdown. They heard that what MCHI really needed was infographics about how to stay safe during COVID-19, as well as assistance with their online presence, such as their website, social media, and online donation platforms. The team split in half, with one group focusing on infographics and one focusing on MCHI’s online presence.
Surprisingly, one of the most challenging aspects of the internship turned out to be helping MCHI set up a donation page. “There’s no official MCHI donation platform, so we were looking into that, and it actually turns out to be really difficult to set that up,” Ashely explains. “So many basic donation sites that we would usually use in the U.S. aren’t compatible and they don’t accept donations for organizations in Uganda. Even GoFundMe and Facebook donations don’t accept funds for organizations in Uganda.” Eventually, they found the site GivenGain for MCHI to use as a platform for online donations in the future.
Additionally, the GROW team was able to complete a revamp of the MCHI website and create many WASH and COVID safety infographics for Uncle Peter to use to educate the MCHI community. However, with the experience of a virtual and distanced internship with a partner in lockdown, Ashley, Uncle Peter, and the GROW team faced many hurdles. To reach their goals for the internship, they had to actively collaborate to overcome these challenges.
Distance and time zone issues were an enormous challenge. When it was 8am in Los Angeles, it was 10pm in Uganda, and vice versa. There were also a lot of internet connectivity problems in Mpoma. This all compounded the natural gaps in communication brought on by a virtual internship: instead of being in the same room as the MCHI staff and being able to have quick in-person check-ins, any message or question from a GROW intern had to be relayed through several layers of virtual communication before a response could make its way back. Ashley notes that even meetings among the UCLA team could be difficult to schedule: due to the virtual nature of the internship, many of the interns had responsibilities in addition to GROW over the summer.
The GROW team purposely addressed these issues by how they set up their communication channels. They had two group chats, one for just the UCLA team (which made it easy to schedule meetings among themselves) and a WhatsApp chat that included Uncle Peter so they could schedule meetings with him. Having half the team work on one project and half work on the other project also helped with scheduling check-ins for individual projects, since there were fewer people to coordinate. The team often flipped the time of day when they would call Uncle Peter; sometimes it was morning for them and evening for him, sometimes vice versa, depending on what worked best for MCHI.
Ashley pinpoints the interns centering MCHI and their flexibility as key to the success of the virtual internship. “If something came up for him [Uncle Peter], they were like, ‘Okay, let’s reschedule, it’s not a big deal,’” says Ashley. “That’s the main thing in terms of what we could help, is being okay with things getting delayed sometimes and recognizing that for Uncle Peter, his sole responsibility is not working with GlobeMed, it’s really running MCHI and supporting the primary school that MCHI founded, and we’re just one piece of that.”
Due to the virtual, distanced nature of the internship, there was a possibility that the interns would feel siloed in their work and not develop strong bonds with the other interns or MCHI. The GROW team was conscious about getting together for weekly social hours to get to know each other outside their work, which Ashley really enjoyed. A key learning for Ashley was trusting the bond between all the GROW interns and being open and honest despite the difficulty of the experience. “[GROW] challenged me to be okay with things changing, being okay with not knowing what the next step is, and then being frank about it with my whole team — instead of just being like ‘Oh, I’m GROW Coordinator, I know what we’re doing,’ being honest with them and saying ‘I don’t know what we’re doing sometimes,’ and then figuring it out together.”
Reflecting on the experience three months later, Ashley says there are some things the unique nature of this year’s GROW experience taught her. “It really highlighted for me how dynamic and unpredictable global health is,” she says. “In the classroom and when we’re planning, we really like things to be laid out, step by step, like a checklist [. . .] and it just never happens like that in real life. Especially in global health work during a pandemic, things can change just like that.”
“At the end of the day,” she concludes, “I learned a lot, I was able to hang out with GlobeMed members for the whole summer, and to me that’s still really special.”
