A legacy of service

It’s a dialogue that Lewis continually has with incoming medical students at the University of Cincinnati, area high school students looking to the future and anyone interested in the work of his organization, Village Life Outreach Project.

King’s call to action sparked a life-changing journey for Lewis more than two decades ago that took him more than 7,700 miles from his native Cincinnati to the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. 

It also forced him to address what he deems life’s second most urgent and persistent question: What are you learning from others? 

Lewis, vice provost of academic affairs at UC and a professor of family and community medicine, is founder of Village Life Outreach Project, a nonprofit based in the 1819 Innovation Hub at UC and dedicated to fighting poverty and making clean water, education and healthcare more accessible in three rural communities in northern Tanzania: Burere, Roche and Nyambogo.

During a May 2023 trip of UC students, staff and faculty to Tanzania, Lewis would consistently remind his group of Bearcats to search for answers to life’s most urgent and persistent questions during their visits to the Tanzanian communities. The students were part of a two-week service learning trip.

“They give us lessons of love, humanitarianism and what it means to really be a global citizen and hear and feel the heartbeat of humanity,” Lewis says of the Tanzanian people.

“So what does that do to you while you're here?” he asks. “And what does that do when you return to Cincinnati and enrich your own community with the lessons that you've learned from here?”

Lewis often leaves those interested in global health with another King thought:

“Everybody can be great — because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

Encouragement to come back to Tanzania after residency came from Esther Kawira, a physician who treated residents with Burkitt’s lymphoma in a Tanzanian hospital, and former UC physician and faculty member Jeff Heck. They encouraged Lewis to think beyond his own impact and create a nonprofit organization to fund projects.

Village LIfe Outreach Project was created in 2004, and that year sent 14 team members to Tanzania, initially focused on health care.

“We were seeing patients in field clinics, but the idea was that we were using the field clinics to attract the community members and distract them a little bit while we had meetings with the community leaders,” says Lewis.

In those meetings, Lewis and his team would discuss partnering with the community: What would that look like and were they even interested?

“It wasn't us coming in and telling the community members what we thought they needed or what our idea of partnership was,” Lewis says. “It was us having a joint, bidirectional dialogue about how we would work together to create sustainable impact. And that was 19 years ago, and we've been doing it ever since.”

“A lot of people look at Village Life and think that we’re an organization that serves people in Tanzania and that’s partly true,” says Lewis. “We partner with communities in Tanzania to provide service, resources, technical know-how, but equally as important as the service we're providing is the lessons that we learn from them.”

For Benya Coleman, a second-year UC medical sciences student, the trip to Africa was a first and an eye-opener. She wants to be an obstetrician-gynecologist someday and knows medical school along with disease, management and holistic patient care are part of her future.

Coleman partnered with Brooke Bartholomew, a second-year pre-med student also considering a career in medicine, to research maternal health and infant mortality in Tanzania. The two women are part of UC’s Marian Spencer Scholarship program and kept Lewis’ advice about service and global health at the forefront of their stay in Tanzania.

During their first visit to Nyambogo, they interviewed teachers and students at a secondary school on an array of topics: curriculum, future occupations, marriage and menstrual health and hygiene.

The girls from Nyambogo also had questions about menstrual cycle irregularity and Bartholomew and Coleman drew upon their own experiences when crafting well-thought-out answers to reassure the adolescents their bodies were behaving normally.

Renewed attention is being given to menstrual health and hygiene in Tanzania, with some in government and UNICEF recognizing it is vital to the empowerment and well-being for girls and women and it is a basic requirement for personal hygiene, reproductive health, dignity and prosperity for girls and women. Attention to the topic remains a challenge in some areas because of limited resources, prevailing sociocultural factors, beliefs, myths and taboos.

A graduate of Hughes High School, a Cincinnati Public School near UC’s uptown campus, Coleman was part of a school-to-work program as a high school junior and senior that allowed her to shadow local health professionals. She worked with physicians in area hospitals’ emergency department, operating room, neurology program, physical therapy unit and other areas.

This experience shaped her perceptions of interactions with Tanzanian midwives and her thoughts about the Roche Health Center, considered a jewel by many in northern Tanzania because it provides critical services for pregnant women and new mothers. Midwives and traditional birth attendants still help deliver most babies in rural areas such as Roche, Nyambogo and Burere in part because travel remains difficult.

“Midwives attend high school, college and the shadowing as part of their preparation,” says Coleman. “But the traditional birth attendants, once they have a couple of kids of their own, are helping other women in a village. The Roche clinic is too far. These women will go into labor, and they are miles and miles away from a clinic, so their only option is these traditional birth attendants.”

Village Life is addressing this gap by performing outreach clinics using Roche Health Center staff, and is working with the community on emergency transportation options.

Bartholomew says she also spoke with the traditional birth attendants and remembers one who had 12 children and five of them died. Her story isn’t unusual as many mothers expect their children not to survive infancy.

Above: Brooke Bartholomew and Benya Coleman tour the health center in Tanzania.

“So when one of them lives it is considered a success,” says Coleman. “That’s really sad because no mother should be expecting their child to die. I wish it was a different success story for women and babies and yet, for the communities we have visited, that’s all they know.”

Bartholomew says her experience in Tanzania will definitely stay with her.

“I think being here and seeing all the different resources that they lack can help me in the future. When I am a doctor, I will learn to practice medicine in every environment regardless of what resources I have,” she explained.

“I think there is a large sense of community here among the locals. Everyone has each other’s back and supports each other,” says Bartholomew.

Lewis says students Coleman, Bartholomew and other Marian Spencer Scholars who visited Tanzania are embarking on a pathway created decades ago by Spencer, a UC alumna and civil rights leader in Cincinnati.

Featured image at top of Benya Coleman in Tanzania. Photo/Sean Hughes
All other photos: Frank Bowen, Sean Hughes and Melanie Schefft
Video editing: Andrew Higley
Digital design: Kerry Overstake
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