Doc Ahmad Hajiri

June 27, 2015 Assalamu Alaykum (Peace be upon you) and a blessed month of Ramadhan! Alhamdulillah, it’s exactly 10 days since I arrived home to Jolo (exactly a day before Ramadhan started :) Since my arrival, I have been working on three things: my summer immersion, my summer elective course and spending a productive Ramadhan with my family. What are those first two? Well, as many of you who personally knew me, I am part of UPCM’s Regionalization Program (RP) who are composed of medical students from the far flung regions in the country who will soon in sha Allah serve the community after graduation from medschool. We are known as the  “RP Students” and every summer vacation, you will find us going back to our community doing our “summer immersions”. We conduct a variety of activities during the said immersions: from conducting public health lectures to surveys on community baseline health data. After each immersion, we are then required to submit our summer im...

Bismillah the Island of Siasi with Bud Siasi on the background Last summer I spent more than a week in Siasi, a smaller island in Sulu. I went there not to spend a wonderful vacation with my family, but to do something bigger, something greater: to conduct my first one-week community immersion! As one of the Regionalization Program (RP) students in the college, we were required to return to our community every summer and conduct our own community immersions before the next school year begins. This is one of the requirements that we have to accomplish for us to be allowed to enroll for the next Learning Unit (or year level). And so, being one of the only two students (out of 160) representing ARMM in our batch, I chose Siasi, Sulu to be my immersion site for the next five years of my stay in Medschool (in shaa Allah), and perhaps until I become a licensed physician someday (Ameen). Now, what did I do in my one-week stay in Siasi? I might not be able to tell all the th...