A Service-Learning Trip Led Chatham Students to Costa Rica
Aleah Siwula ’25 takes a patient’s temperature at a mobile clinic in Costa Rica, where Siwula volunteered as part of the student group MEDLIFE. (Courtesy of Aleah Siwula)
When they left for their trip in Costa Rica, Aleah Siwula ’25 and Madison Moan ’25 couldn’t believe it.
“We were on the plane like, wait— we’re going?” Siwula said.
The experience was part of a service-learning trip for their student organization, MEDLIFE, which works with low-income communities in Latin America and Africa to improve access to medicine, education, and community development projects, according to the group’s website.
Siwula and Moan, both of whom are majoring in human biology at Chatham University, are the respective president and secretary of Chatham’s MEDLIFE student group. Both of them joined the organization after hearing about it at a student engagement fair at Chatham, where the local chapter was promoting their service-learning trips. (While focused on pre-med students, a health sciences major is not a requirement for members, Siwula said.)
On their first day, they worked at a mobile healthcare clinic on a soccer pitch outside the beach town of Tamarindo.
“It was nothing like I expected it to be at all,” said Moan. “They would set up a clinic in any location where it was needed or anywhere they could reach the most people.”
Moan (third from left) and Siwula (second from right) stand alongside fellow student volunteers from Chatham University in Costa Rica. (Courtesy of Aleah Siwula)
After they touched down, met their guide, and checked into a resort, shuttles carried them to a number of locations: the mobile healthcare clinic, an elementary school, and a community center were a few examples.
At the elementary school, Moan helped teach kids how to practice proper dental care. At another clinic, where she was working with an adult patient, she learned more about hernias after helping examine one, she said.
“I do not speak fluent Spanish, so the language barrier was very hard to get over with the patients,” Moan said. “Asking for help and translation was a good skill that I learned.”
One day there, they helped a local family with housework—painting, replacing shutters, and cleaning—since a man who lived there had asthma and other medical issues.
In all, the group spent eight days in the Central American country.
“Not only seeing those communities but being able to make the tiniest impact on those people’s lives is something I’ll cherish forever,” said Siwula. “It was life-changing.”
Moan said the trip helped her to see a brand-new perspective of the medical field. “From shadowing PAs and working in a hospital, I see firsthand how the health system functions,” she said. “Seeing this in another country was a whole different story.”
Visit chatham.edu to learn more about the University’s human biology degree, as well as other programs in the School of Health Sciences.