It all started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Thanks to her background in community engagement as a former Morgridge Center peer advisor and six semesters as a Badger Volunteer, Emily Merkel has spent the last six months as a community health outreach volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in Western Kenya.
Merkel graduated from UW-Madison in 2022 with a degree in global health and a desire to provide people in other countries with the proper knowledge and resources to lead the healthiest lives possible.
Initially a pre-med student at UW-Madison, Merkel discovered public health her first year at UW and fell in love with it, ultimately deciding to switch majors. After her undergraduate years at UW-Madison, Merkel was accepted into the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and earned her Master’s of Public Health in community health promotion. Due to the pandemic, Merkel had missed out on the opportunity to study abroad at UW, which informed her decision to travel to Kenya during the summer of 2023 for a public health internship after the first year of her master’s program.
During that summer, Merkel fell in love with the culture, her host family and the overall work that she was now a big part of. While some days feel insignificant and drawn-out, she describes the importance of living in the moment.
“It’s definitely just one day at a time,” explains Merkel, while reflecting on her time in the program. “They say the days are long, but the weeks go by fast.”
After finishing her master’s program, she decided to apply for a two-year program through the United States Peace Corps, bringing her back to Kenya.
While abroad Merkel’s way of life has shifted drastically—everything from limited power to washing and drying laundry outdoors—these changes can often be overwhelming. To remind her that home isn’t so far away, Merkel often cooks American classics, including spaghetti, popcorn or pancakes and even spends some days in a nearby hotel where she can sit, sip tea and listen to American music. Despite these big adjustments, Merkel has been able to find beauty in everything and everyone.
“The people here have already affected my life, through their friendship, just getting to know them,” says Merkel.
Her daily tasks as a health outreach volunteer include registering patients, testing vitals, working with data collection and record keeping as well as assisting in schools to teach adolescents about HIV, STI and pregnancy prevention methods.
Before recent government funding restrictions from the U.S., Merkel co-facilitated a program which aimed to teach young girls about autonomy, reproductive health and lifelong goals. While the tasks differ from what Merkel had originally anticipated as a volunteer, she has found teaching—something she had never considered before—to be extremely fulfilling.
Merkel shares that it can sometimes be difficult to know whether she’s making an impact, but certain conversations where her students are able to confide in her about anything going on in their lives, give her confidence that she is making a real difference.
This type of drive inspires Merkel’s hopes for the rest of her time in Kenya as well as her future plans. She hopes to visit more of Western Kenya and collaborate with other volunteers to identify a gap that she can help to solve—a difficult task due to cuts in international funding and material resources becoming limited.
When the Peace Corps was founded in 1961, the organization was built upon three core values: providing trained professionals to countries in need, allowing the people served to understand the American culture and granting Americans the chance to immerse themselves in a different country’s culture.
Merkel shares that she appreciates the core approaches of the organization, sharing that it highly aligns with what she learned during her time at the Morgridge Center. The place where her love for community engagement started, is the reason why Merkel can’t imagine her future without community engagement.
“I think it would be hard not to do that, not to just try to help others,” says Merkel, when contemplating her potential career plans, ranging from counselor to physician. “Those are all just different avenues to help people, and they’re all important in their own ways.”