![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/218\/2022\/08\/Arianna_HDUsm9R6A2985.jpg\")
Arianna examining a tiny patient in AIC Kijabi Hospital\u2019s neonatal intensive care.<\/p><\/div>\n
Shirk didn\u2019t know that when she pronounced to her parents, at the age of 5, she was going to live in Africa when she grew up. But odds are, if she had it would only have deepened her desire to move to a place where some part of her has always known she was supposed to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat really was what I said,\u201d Shirk recalls, and nothing since has made her waver. Kijabi means \u201cPlace of the Wind\u201d in Maasai, and it rises almost 7,000 feet above sea level\u2013higher than any place in North America east of the Mississippi River\u2013on the edge of east Africa\u2019s Great Rift Valley. A 3,700-mile long trench dividing the continent, the Valley is one of the few barriers massive enough to symbolically rival the one between the resources available to doctors in the U.S. and to those in Kenya.<\/p>\n
AIC Kijabi Hospital has 363 beds and five of the country\u2019s approximately 100 ICU beds. Knowing that 46 million people live in Kenya provides perspective. Nearly all of its supplies are donated, as is Shirk\u2019s salary.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of my families live on somewhere between $30 and $40 a month, so every test I order, everything I do, every day they stay in the hospital, means they can\u2019t feed their other children, they can\u2019t pay their rent, they can\u2019t plant their crops,\u201d Shirk says. \u201cThose are the unbelievable sociological and ethical issues that I have to consider every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fortunately for her patients, Shirk has been considering those issues since her days as an undergraduate, thanks to the unique opportunities Furman presented and she pursued. Shirk \u201creally, really\u201d wanted to attend Furman after a scholarship interview, and once on campus she took advantage of the Individualized Curriculum (ICP) Program to design a major that would allow her to become exactly the kind of doctor she intended to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew I wanted to practice medicine in a resource-limited setting, and I think I\u2019m literally the only person that\u2019s ever graduated from Furman with that major,\u201d Shirk says, referring to her bachelor of science in perspectives on poverty and health. \u201cBut I circled everything I wanted to take in the catalogue and figured out a way to make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the classes that got the red-marker treatment was The Medicine Program, a medical ethics and medical sociology course co-taught by sociology professor Kristy Maher, Ph.D., and philosophy professor Carmela Epright, Ph.D. Thought to be the only program of its kind on the country, The Medicine Program puts students in medical facilities trailing doctors and other healthcare professionals as they make difficult real-world decisions. Hands-on, high-impact programs like these are part of Furman’s promise to every student through The Furman Advantage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did design my major around their class \u2026 (because) I felt like being able to get that perspective was incredibly important before I started practicing medicine,\u201d Shirk says. \u201cI didn\u2019t understand diabetes. I didn\u2019t understand a urinary tract infection or a heart attack, but I could look at the dynamics of the family, and I could look at how things were affecting the families separate from medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/218\/2022\/08\/solomon-4961.jpeg\")
Arianna teaching former interns to build bubble c-pap tubing for use at field hospitals.<\/p><\/div>\n
Shirk went on to earn a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship and attend the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, where she grew up, focusing on pediatric emergency medicine. During her residency in Alabama, Shirk briefly wondered if she should devote herself to America\u2019s inner cities, but a year in Taiwan as a Luce Scholar with husband David Shirk \u201902, whom she\u2019d married less than a month after both graduated from Furman, refocused her lenses.<\/p>\n
In 2013, the couple and their daughters, Madeline and Annabelle, visited Kijabi. Their path was set.<\/p>\n
\u201cI called my parents and told them we were planning on moving,\u201d Shirk says. David knew it was coming, and on some level Arianna\u2019s family did too. Still, the realization of her lifelong dream didn\u2019t come without some trepidation.<\/p>\n
Shirk signed up for just a two-year commitment to make sure being 8,000 miles away from the life she\u2019d always known was really going to work for the family. They moved in the fall of 2014 as part of Samaritan\u2019s Purse post-residency program, and by the time they returned to America last fall for a mandatory furlough, required to combat burnout, they had their answer.<\/p>\n
David, a religion major at Furman, works as a photographer and is the executive director of Friends of Kijabi, the hospital\u2019s non-profit fundraiser. Even more importantly, Madeline (now 11) and Annebelle (8) love their adopted home.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a daily thing to see monkeys, and we get zebras on the side of the road all the time. It\u2019s like seeing cows,\u201d Shirk says. \u201cI\u2019m still in awe every time we get to go walk with giraffes, but the last time we did it my girls stopped looking at the giraffes to pick flowers. It was like, OK, our life is a little bit different.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a word Epright uses to describe Shirk. The two have been friends since Arianna was her student, and Epright marvels at her priorities and courage.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere\u2019s what she won\u2019t tell you: Emergency pediatric medicine is very rare,\u201d Epright says. \u201cYou have to be outstanding to do a fellowship in it, and if she were in the United States she could probably make a half a million dollars a year because there just aren\u2019t pediatric doctors that are trained in emergency medicine \u2026 When you\u2019re in Africa, you have nothing, so you have to figure out how to do incredibly complicated medicine \u2026 with very limited medication, very limited access. That\u2019s not going into missionary work for a semester. That\u2019s a level of commitment that\u2019s hard to express.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Arianna and David Shirk \u201902 with girls Madeline and Annabelle<\/p><\/div>\n
Shirk gave a CLP and spoke to Epright\u2019s class when she and David visited campus last fall as part of their whirlwind five months in the United States, which, in addition to a welcome opportunity to attend sister Sandra\u2019s wedding and visit college friends, allowed Madeline and Annebelle to experience North America\u2019s exotic wildlife (\u201cThey think squirrels chasing each other is just amazing,\u201d Shirk said with a laugh).<\/p>\n
If you think the time in America might also make the Shirks long for home, you\u2019re right. And it was 24 hours of travel away. She signed up for the maximum five-year commitment this time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is where we hope to be for as long as we can see into the future,\u201d Shirk says. \u201cA lot of life is beautifully simple in Kenya, and I get to live on the edge of the Great Rift Valley with these spectacular sunsets every night. A lot of the distraction, a lot of the noise that we deal with in the U.S., is not here. We really feel like this is the call on our lives. This is why I\u2019m a doctor, which is hard to put into words.\u201d<\/p>\n