Students Receive African Languages Fellowships.
“My heart was left in Senegal,” says Faith Umoh. After two years there with the Peace Corps, she returned to the US last spring to pursue an MPH at the School of Public Health—and discovered a way to stay connected to Senegal and Wolof, its main language, at the same time.
Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships from the Boston University African Studies Center support both undergraduate and graduate BU students studying African languages. Next year’s fellows include two SPH students, Umoh and Dan Flanagan.
Being able to speak the language of a population “is really about access to care,” says Flanagan, a BA/MPH dual degree student studying Zulu.
Language is absolutely necessary, he adds, for “making sure that people who are in public health or in medicine are well-equipped to provide the care that the people there need.”
Peter Quella, assistant director of the BU African Studies Program, says public health and African languages are a natural fit.
“It didn’t take much for us to recognize this synergy between our desire to teach African languages and African studies courses and this very active and interested group of scholars,” he says. Two to four SPH students have received FLAS awards for each of the last five years, with SPH faculty—“BU’s most active researchers on the African continent”—making up nearly one-third of the program’s campus affiliates on campus.
“The relationship between the School of Public Health and the African Studies Center is vital,” agrees Jennifer Beard, assistant professor of global health and one of the faculty members leading the SPH East Africa Field Practice Program. (This spring semester, Beard actually took a class called Swahili with a Health Focus, offered by the College of Arts & Sciences on the Medical Campus.)
This is the second FLAS fellowship for both Flanagan, who received the undergraduate fellowship as a sophomore, and Umoh, who was a fellow this year as well. For graduate students, the FLAS fellowship is supplemented by the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences to cover tuition for the year.
“I see it as a really special opportunity to make sure I make the most out of both learning Wolof in an academic setting and my master’s in public health,” says Umoh, who believes language-learning provides a valuable lens to public health work.
With any population, she explains, “I want to be connected to a whole, to understand the context, the language, the culture.”