How a medical mission connected one student’s future to Armenia

I was born and raised in Maryland, thousands of miles from Armenia, but like so many in the diaspora, the homeland has always lived in me. As I’ve grown older and thought more seriously about what it means to carry that homeland with me, I’ve found myself asking how the life and career I am building can contribute to its future. Now, in my final year of medical school, I have found my calling in ophthalmology, and this September, I had the opportunity to bring these two important parts of my life together as a medical student observer on the Armenian EyeCare Project’s (AECP) annual medical mission trip.

The desire to work for my people, both locally and in the homeland, has been a longstanding one. For many years, I have been a proud member of Washington D.C.’s AYF-YOARF and Homenetmen chapters. It was largely through these organizations that I learned to take the hayrenasirutyun first cultivated at home and turn it into work. Medical school, meanwhile, gave me the space to develop my professional identity and think deeply about the kind of physician I hope to become. But even as that vision took shape, whatever future I imagined for myself, I knew my homeland would somehow have to be part of it.