Peacock Bowls
MEERA AL-RAJABI UMKC MEDICAL STUDENT
Beatopia
MEERA AL-RAJABI UMKC MEDICAL STUDENT
Medium: Mixed media/drawing Artist’s statement: This piece represents the emotional journey one experiences while listening to music, specifically indie rock. Bea Kristi, or "Beabadoobee," is the singer who inspired this piece. Her portrait features a mix of charcoal, graphite and printed aspects, in the style of realism, which directly contrasts with the background of bright, acrylic doodles that signify the feelings associated with her music.
Splinters of Light: A Dark and Scary Night in Rural Mid-Central China
JASON KENNETH HARPER MANAGER OF MEDICAL EDUCATION, COUNCIL ON CURRICULUM, SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
The night I broke a wooden-stemmed ear-swab in my ear remains one of the most humbling experiences of my 10 years living and teaching English in rural China. It began as a moment of carelessness — a small, ordinary act of personal hygiene gone wrong — and unfolded into a vivid encounter with a medical system profoundly different from the one I had always known in the states. What emerged from that panicked night was a deeper appreciation for the human side of medicine, illuminated by contrast, improvisation, and compassion amid scarcity. When the thin wooden stem snapped, half of it vanished somewhere in my ear canal. Panic quickly replaced logic. I called a campus staff translator and, together, we found a taxi willing to drive the long distance into town that late at night. The roads were dark, the air was damp, and the foggy silence hummed over only by the taxi engine’s murmur, the driver’s intermittent zippo lighter, and my racing thoughts. I clutched onto the broken half of the swab as evidence, hoping it might help the doctor understand the situation and gallantly locate and extract the missing piece. Inside the emergency department, the air was denser with urgency. Patients filled every corner — an elderly farmer with a compound fracture of the radius, a man whose foot appeared to have been run over by a tractor, and young people with fevers and coughing fits resonating from the depths of their lungs that spoke of infections and extended pulmonary fatigue. Upon seeing me — a 5’11”, bearded, 老外[1] — and the translator, the ER registrar hurriedly ushered us through the crowded waiting area, our pace quickened by the staff, jumping to the head of the line. I felt the weight of moral dissonance. Why was I, an uninjured foreigner, being rushed past those whose suffering was visible, bloody, and raw? The ear, nose, and throat area lay in near darkness. Two seated nurses stirred from their dozing when we entered, and they called in the doctor from another room. The only light in the exam room came from a dim bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling and the thin reflection from the doctor’s head mirror. The reflection never quite aligned with my ear. I asked, through the translator, if the health clinic had an otoscope. The doctor shook his head and, in careful English, said, “No.” He peered for several minutes, murmured softly, and finally admitted that the light in the room was too weak to see clearly. “Come back in the morning,” he said through the translator.
The words “come back in the morning” auto-played in my brain with a muffled echo as we left. It was past midnight when I returned to my apartment, the air thick with early summer humidity and my own worry. I could not stop imagining the fragment —with its sharp wooden edge — threatening to pierce my eardrum, maybe even reaching deeper. I set the half of the evidentiary swab on my desk as if it might balance the situation somehow, then paced toward the bathroom to brush my teeth before a long night of waiting. When I turned on the light, I froze. There, on the bathroom floor, lay the other half of the broken swab — unmistakably wholly the swab’s other half — harmless, and far from my ear. The tension that had tightened my chest for hours released in a wave of laughter, relief, and humility. I stared at the small object that had caused so much anxiety, now illuminated by the bright, 老外’s bathroom light that the hospital had lacked. That night taught me more about the human condition than I could have anticipated. It revealed how fragility — whether of health, light, or understanding — binds us across cultures. I had witnessed the triage of need in a rural hospital where power outages and limited resources made every act of care an improvisation. Yet, even in that dim room, I saw something enduring: a doctor’s willingness to help with what he had and my own capacity to find grace in uncertainty. In the practice of medicine, as in life, light is sometimes scarce. But it is in those dimly lit spaces — where tools are few and understanding must bridge languages — that we learn the true art of compassion. The small, splintered Q-tip became my teacher that night, reminding me that empathy often begins not with cure, but with connection. [1] (lǎowài, which trans-literally means "old outsider")