I’ll never forget the pounding, throbbing headache that heralded meningococcal meningitis. I remember leaning against the wall in the bathroom of my local doctor’s waiting rooms, steaming with a temperature of 40°C, and thinking “This is it. I must be dying”. The pain was so intense I just couldn’t see how my body could survive. Every skerrick of light seeping through my shut eyelids felt like lasers beaming through to burn my brain. As I was a boarder in a rural school, I was alone — I was afraid — and I was 14.

After losing consciousness and a helicopter flight to Sydney, I awoke after a week, in the intensive care unit of the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. One week later, when I could stomach food, I was moved into a ward. I was sharing with a 2-year-old boy who also had meningitis, but whose septicaemia had taken hold of his young body more aggressively than it had of mine. I remember watching him being wheeled out of the room one morning, only to return 6 hours later with no lower legs.

The author, surrounded by orphans in Nairobi, Kenya.

Days passed, and much to everyone’s shock, I continued to recover, with no residual disability. The months to full health were many, yet the realisation of surviving a fatal disease, completely unscathed, began to sink in. I was left with a sense of “survivor’s guilt” — an intense appreciation of life and how fortunate I was, a realisation of the gift that life is, and a yearning to make the most of every living, breathing moment that remained.

My first decision was to study medicine, to fulfil a desire to give something back to the profession that had saved my life. A month in a children’s hospital is the best work experience one could have, and despite coming from a family with generations of strength in the arts, especially music, I decided to take up chemistry at school and begin to focus on the sciences. Unprepared, I sat the undergraduate medicine admission test in my final year of high school, and my marks were nowhere near those required for entrance. Undeterred, I headed off on a gap year abroad, working as a music and drama teacher in the United Kingdom before studying Italian in Florence. I returned in 2001 to the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra to study for a Bachelor of Science (Psychology)/Bachelor of Arts, following my sister’s footsteps to John XXIII College. A year later, a summer internship on the trading floor at Macquarie Bank in Sydney saw me shift to a Bachelor of Commerce/Bachelor of Science, and I returned to Macquarie Bank for three more challenging summers in finance. Equity markets and medicine are deceptively similar: both are fast-paced, intellectually demanding, unpredictable and exciting work environments. Yet despite the “buzz” of my experience in the financial world, I couldn’t shake my medical aspirations. During lunch hours in Martin Place, I would sit and stare at the homeless people seeking shelter under the buildings in which others were making millions, and I knew that a profession in medicine would be the only way to satisfy my desire to help people while challenging me intellectually.

Education session and distribution of subsidised insecticide-treated nets by Hands of Help volunteers and health workers in Uganda.

After two more unsuccessful attempts at the undergraduate medical admissions test, I turned to the postgraduate admission procedure. In the penultimate year of my undergraduate course, I sat the Graduate Australian Medical Schools Admissions Test (GAMSAT) as mere practice for the following year, but fortunately, my marks were high enough to result in a placement at the University of Sydney.

I was bursting with enthusiasm to begin the postgraduate medical course after 4 inspired years as an undergraduate. To pay the bills during my days in Canberra, I had worked as a therapist for children with autism, conducting applied behavioural analysis for children with profound disability at a special education school in Woden. What began as a job soon turned into a passion as I learned how to communicate with children who had no speech, honing my empathy skills as I tried to learn to read their expressions and mannerisms to understand how they were feeling and what they were trying to say. These children, with beautiful personalities frustratingly stuck in less useful bodies, absolutely grew on me. My appreciation of life continued to grow and, while I hope the hours of therapy I did with those children helped them become a little more capable, ultimately they taught me far more.

In my last holidays before beginning medicine, I made a trip to Africa, a continent which had fascinated me since reading Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One as an impressionable teenager. In my commerce degree, I had majored in development economics and was inspired by a senior lecturer at the university, Dr Alan Martina, who brought to light for me the inequalities existing in our world today. My passion for the subject saw me begin to devour novels on the area, and an inspirational meeting with Nobel Prize nominee Professor Jack Caldwell, who has devoted much of his life to demography in Africa, sealed my interest.

Thanking the Bufuula community for their hospitality at the end of the volunteers’ 3-month stay to build a primary school in 2005.

I spent a month in East Africa those holidays, and was changed forever by the experience. In Africa, the continent on which we all began as Homo sapiens, it is impossible not to feel alive. There is a magic about the place and its absolute determination to defeat the myriad obstacles that have been placed in its way — geographical disadvantage, slavery, colonialism, and continuing epidemics — and this fiery determination burns through to your heart, making it impossible to walk away unchanged.

I remember my plane taking off from Nairobi and promising to myself that I would return, but next time with more money, more time, and more people to make a difference. I graduated from the ANU and started studying medicine 6 months later. I had already emailed all my family and friends to rally interest in working and raising funds for the continent, but as the work began, the interest dissipated. Not knowing a soul in my new medical course, I took the plunge to email my entire year group about my idealistic plan. The response was amazing.

The following summer, in December 2005, 17 volunteers, including 12 medical students from the University of Sydney, headed to Uganda to live in a remote community for 3 months, with no water or electricity, as we built a primary school for 650 children. We paid our own way to get there, juggling part-time jobs on top of full-time medical degrees, and left with our backpacks and $100 000 in the Hands of Help bank account — the result of an exhausting year of fundraising and the generosity of those supporting our idea. On the back of such enthusiasm, I set in motion the wheels to register ourselves as a charity, and Hands of Help was born, with a grassroots commitment to ensuring all funds raised reached the areas of the world that needed them most. To date, over 98% of our hundreds of thousands of dollars has been spent “on the ground” in Africa or Indigenous Australia, something we are proud of, and a figure not often achieved in the world of charitable organisations.

A young girl in Bufuula, proudly wearing a Hands of Help armband.

Living in an African community, experiencing life the way Africans do, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We grew close to the children, their parents and the local community council, and developed an understanding of health care in the developing world through visits to local clinics and hospitals. I rustled together a survey, which we conducted with local interpreters, of every household in Bufuula — the tiny village we were living in, located 3 hours south-east of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. As we sat in each home, showered with papayas, fresh milk from their cows and raw peanuts or coffee beans, we listened intently to their stories. We swallowed hard past the lumps in our throats as we heard recollections of their many children lost to malaria, while smiling toddlers sat in the corner of the hut eating cardboard to ward off their grumbling tummies. We stood humbly at the grave sites of mothers lost to AIDS while holding the hands of their children left behind, and we listened to their desperate pleas for access to health care and education.

The first Hands of Help group of volunteers.

Inspired, we headed off to Kampala to meet with Dr Ian Clarke, of the International Hospital Kampala (IHK), who agreed to support us to begin a community health project in Bufuula, training and employing Ugandans selected by their own communities to become grassroots health workers in areas where hospitals are out of reach. The project began in Bufuula and surrounding villages, and this year will reach as far afield as the war-torn areas of northern Uganda. Over 50 Ugandans have been trained as health workers by a public health specialist. Subsidised mosquito nets have been distributed, water sanitation satchels have been added to jerry cans, and HIV testing has been made available, along with education sessions on all relevant diseases, by these health workers who are proud and honoured to be trained as such. They see their new knowledge as such a privilege that they feel a responsibility to spread it to as many towns as possible.

That summer was the beginning of years of achievements for Hands of Help. Seventeen volunteers, to whom I — and Africa — are forever indebted for believing in me and my ideas, left that initial project enlightened and inspired to be part of improving the inexcusable health inequalities facing so many in our world today. On the way home, our chance trip to an orphanage with unparalleled atrocious living conditions resulted in a commitment to help 250 orphans in Nairobi, Kenya. These orphans are now being given a chance at life, receiving a secondary school education through our child sponsorship program. Yet, also conscious of the issues in our own backyard, we returned to Australia and established a project to allow medical students to work with local Aboriginal medical services in remote Indigenous communities.

And so I approach the final year of medical school, with years of hard work, sleepless nights and exhaustion from overwork behind me — and that’s before internship has even begun! It would be unrealistic, and lying, to say it has been easy, and I often look longingly at those enjoying a weekend off or a holiday. Yet, thanks to the hard work of dedicated committee members, a balanced partnership with medical student and Vice-President Joe Dusseldorp, who believed in Hands of Help from its inception, an extremely supportive family and partner, and the generosity of the Australian public, the charity has achieved more than I could ever have hoped for in that moment my plane took off from Nairobi.

Over 100 volunteers have now given up their summers to build three new primary schools in Uganda, 50 Ugandans have been trained as community health workers, 250 Kenyan orphans have been given another chance at life, and a further 25 medical students have spent their holidays experiencing health care for Indigenous Australians. Meanwhile, awareness of African issues, and a chance for Africans to speak with their own voice, is provided by our Sydney African Film Festival1 and photographic exhibitions every year by a professional photographer (my partner, Hamish Gregory, who travels the globe with me). This summer, a further 30 volunteers will travel to the war-ravaged areas of northern Uganda to build a fourth school, while the Community Health Project will expand to service the two million people displaced by years of civil war in Gulu.

Conducting hut-to-hut health surveys with local interpreters in Uganda.

As I approach the coming years of my junior medical and specialty training with trepidation and curiosity as to where the path of medicine will take me, I find solace and inspiration from the thought that dozens of medical students now have a passion for our world’s health inequalities. I am continuously supported and encouraged by my parents and motivated by the work of doctors such as Catherine Hamlin, whose work with women with obstetric fistulas in Ethiopia has turned around the lives of 32 000 women, and Rowan Gillies, the former President of Médecins Sans Frontières. I am encouraged by supportive lecturers and honours supervisors, and always astounded by the passion of selfless doctors who take the time to pass on the secrets of medicine by teaching and motivating young students every day. But without a doubt, the thoughts that stay closest to my heart are the memories of an African child’s piercing stare delving deep into my soul, and the throbbing pain of that meningitic headache — and I pinch myself and remember how lucky I am to be here, where I am today, and I think of how much there is to squeeze into these short years — and how wonderful it is to be alive.