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| A maternity ward teacher and her baby with Gardner. |
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You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
—Mahatma Gandhi
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
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“I need pigs’ feet,” was Katrina Gardner’s first thought. That evening, she bought some at a local meat market, so she could practice suturing. Gardner knew she would need that skill for her work the next day at the largest public hospital in Quito, Ecuador, where she would be put in charge of the burn unit and debride the flesh of burn patients and suture their wounds. As a junior at Smith College majoring in neuroscience, Gardner found her summer fellowship to create your “dream job” to be a formative clinical experience, especially since her initial goal was to improve her medical Spanish. Gardner, a native of Dickinson, N.D., doesn’t come from a family with a medical background: they are farmers and ranchers, self-starters who make do with what is available to get the job done in spartan conditions.
