February has come and gone with colorful celebrations of the victory of Adwa and Black History Month in Ethiopia as well as different parts of the globe. Today the Nation is celebrating the International Women Day, March 8 for its 43rd time.
Despite the fact that the effort on women empowerment and their contribution in socioeconomic, political, scientific and innovative areas is improving from time to time, there is still much more to do for societies to recognize the many greatest things that women have accomplished going under difficulties of different traditional challenges and stereotypes. There are so many heroines around us, who have done the most amazing things and not given the necessary credits.
The Ethiopian Medical Association (EMA) has recently celebrated its 54th anniversary with different occasions and recognizing professionals best contribution to their country was part of it.
Dr. Zufan Lakew, a gynecologist and Obstetrician was one of the people who get the recognition and received the award of merit from the Association. Starting as general practitioner Dr. Zufan has been serving in medical profession for more than thirty years.
She has served as a lecturer, team leader, department head and dean of medical school at Black Lion Hospital for seventeen years. She told The Ethiopian Herald that her medical career throughout those years has been a tough professional journey though the lessons in every step of the road played crucial role to the exemplary person she has become now.
She remember that during her early times in medical service, dreadful realities were part of health practitioners daily experience. Due to policy gaps, lack of technology, medical equipment, facility and accessibility as well as shortage of health workers, loss of patients’ lives from abortion, pregnancy and labor issues was common and painful experience. Meanwhile, fearing the challenges and retreating from the job would never be the answer.
Dr. Zufan with her colleagues kept on putting much effort on producing more health professionals with the limited resource provided by the government. “That was a time of reform for the medical school as it expanded the number of fields. When I began serving as a dean, there also comes directions and pressure from the government to enroll more medical students. Even if we don’t have much capacity we tried our best to discharge our responsibility without compromising the quality of the education. Our motto by that time was, changing challenge in to an opportunity.
We opened abandoned building and stores and made them classrooms. We utilized every resource exhaustively. We opened several specialty and sub-specialty departments that we identified relevant for our community,” she noted. In addition, Dr. Zufan and her partners made contacts with other international associations, like the Ethiopian North America Health Professionals Association and created favorable educational conditions for the new departments. More teachers also started to be involved in the medical education.
She said the dreary experiences that have been mentioned above are currently just past experiences. Mothers’ death because of birth delivery issues is no longer a big challenge, according to her. Speaking of quality medical education Zufan says students need dedicated lecturers. “It is not only the medical science that they need to learn; they need personality too.
Medical education is all about developing personality, commitment and professionalism. When you enroll so many students in a little space, this type of quality maybe compromised because it is difficult to supervise,” noted Zufan. Meanwhile in order to maintain quality health service in the country she believes that it is better to follow the professional standards.
One can learn ethics from other partners. But meeting the standard is inevitable. Every association, team or organization need to its own regulatory mechanisms, according to her. Dr. Zufan’s experience and her principle could only indicate that women knows how to do the best with the list. We have seen so many women discharging several responsibilities beginning from administrating house holds to career jobs. Mostly African women do not only discharge responsibilities but also carry hard burdens with difficult traditional influences.
The international theme for this year’s march eight celebration is ‘Balance for better’. Balancing for better in Ethiopia has already showing good results in terms of bringing women on the front line of leadership. Prime Minister Dr. Abiy’s administration has already given a fifty- fifty share for female leaders on Ministerial level.
The challenges of traditional attitudes and the stereotype towards women, cannot be an issue to be solved unless women take the leading role in breaking all the misunderstandings between their societies. They should not give in or not fail for unintentionally internalized inferiority. They need to know their potentials by recognizing how much their mothers and grandmothers have suffered but managed to keep families and societies stronger and bigger.
The Ethiopian Herald March 9, 2019
BY HENOK TIBEBU
