Chicago Fulbright scholar ‘embarrassed to be American’ after Trump cut funding for her work in Africa
It’s always been my dream to do a Fulbright fellowship. It just seemed to me the epitome of being able to be an ambassador for our country without actually working for the State Department — to represent the best of what America has to offer.
Fulbright only lets 1 in 5 people in as fellows. So, I thought to myself, ‘Who am I to think that I would be able to get such a prestigious honor?’ I guess it just took friends of mine to believe in me, to help me believe in myself.
[When they award you the scholarship,] they send you an email … they don’t even say congratulations in the [subject] line. They just say, ‘Click to find out.’ And then I found out. I kind of screamed a little bit. And then I called my mom and my friends and said, ‘Yeah, I guess I gotta go,’ because I didn’t think I was going to get it.
I arrived in the capital city of Uganda on Jan. 20, 2025. Then I took a five-and-a-half–hour drive down to Kabale, which is in southwest Uganda. I’m staying at a medical student guesthouse that is just a couple of blocks away from the Kabale University School of Medicine.
One of my most fulfilling experiences with a patient so far was … we had a 64-year-old lady who’d had an abnormal Pap test done at an outside clinic, and she came to us for follow-up. But this hospital doesn’t actually have a pathology department, so they can’t actually take a Pap test and look at it.
So, I showed my residents how to do a simple test called visual inspection under acetic acid. All we do is just have a look at the cervix with simple table vinegar, and it can tell us whether or not we’re suspicious of any kind of abnormality.
So, we did that for the patient, and we realized that her abnormal Pap had progressed, and that it was better for us to go ahead and do a surgery, to make sure that she doesn’t have to worry about that ever again.
The East African Fulbrighters, we have our own little WhatsApp group chat. One of my colleagues said, ‘Hey, I didn’t get my second set of funding. Do you know anything about it?’ None of us knew anything about it. Then, finally, we heard on the news that the funding had been cut [in February].
I would have to say I’m a little embarrassed to be American right now. I’ve been apologizing to everybody. The part that really hurts the most is that we are supposed to be the best of the best that the United States has to offer to the world, and we’ve been treated as if we don’t matter, because apparently, to this administration, we don’t.
I’ve been to many, many countries, and while people like Europe, they love America. It is a visceral and deep love of this country — my country, America. It takes years to cultivate that type of sentiment, that love of America, and you can’t go anywhere without seeing a USAID sign here in Uganda and many of the places where I’ve been.
Now, it’s all gone. Vaccine programs are gone. Nurses where I work have been furloughed. I saw a headline in a Ugandan newspaper just yesterday, saying they’re running out of HIV meds for their patients.
The reason that we are loved so much is because we do this kind of work. Without it, we’re just nothing.
Anna Savchenko is a reporter for WBEZ.