Kaitlyn Farley knew long before she ever departed Bridgeport and Bridgeport High School to begin a seven-year collegiate educational journey that she was blessed. Yet Farley said it was at the end of those seven years, which came earlier this month at West Virginia University, that how fortunate she’s been and nearly everyone else hit home.

 

Farley, who just turned 26 and graduated from WVU with a Doctorate in Pharmacy, learned all about what true struggle is as part of her educational process in the last rotation in pharmacy school in Morgantown.

 

Instead of doing work in a local hospital or even a poverty stricken area of West Virginia or the United States, Farley volunteered – and was selected – to go overseas. She ended up in Santarém, Pará Brazil, which is located at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers.

 

Kaitlyn Farley, the daughter of Bridgeport’s Norm and Cheryl Farley, was about to finish her college education by working in the rain forest.

 

Before talking about what she did, it’s important to know how she got there. Farley’s interest in the medical field is nothing unusual. In fact, it’s a family trait.

 

Her mother has been a nurse for decades. Both of her sisters are also nurses. Yet Farley decided nursing wasn’t the route for her.

 

“Healthcare has always been in my family, but I kind of ruled out nursing. I don’t like blood or the things they have to deal with so I went with the route of medication,” said Farley.

 

Of course deciding what you want to do doesn’t just happen. Farley, a BHS 2010 graduate, actually began preparing for it in high school.

 

“I guess I had what would be called a science major because that’s the career path I had chosen. I took the basic science classes and took extra chemistry and extra physics because I knew it would be crucial for my undergraduate degree and getting accepted into pharmacy school,” said Farley.  “All the work at BHS and the help of the teachers there helped it pay off.”

 

Her first set was spending three years at the University of Charleston where she majored in pre-pharmacy. After that, she was accepted at WVU and began her path toward becoming a pharmacist.

 

The process was not unusual as she covered the path likely covered by thousands in the past. However, her conclusion on the path is one not many opt to travel and only a few are allowed to do so.

 

“The School of Pharmacy has a few international rotations and you have to play for them and then be selected. I applied, as part of an elective rotation, to go to Brazil,” said Farley. “The teachers elected two students to go and I was one of them.”

 

Once selected, you are placed under the care of a group known as Amizade. Farley said they’re a global service organization set up for learning and the learning scenario in Brazil was for healthcare.

 

“Amizade prepared us and got us knowing about the area in Brazil and we need to do, what we would need to bring and what we could expect,” said Farley, the area’s newest PharmD.

 

Her initial experience wasn’t one dealing with poverty. The family she stayed with in Brazil for weeks lived in a huge and “gorgeous” home.

 

“They were very nice and we found out they had more things than most, even Wi-Fi, which was very helpful. You realized things were different because the cost of electricity was so high that they just left everything open – windows and doors – to try and keep it cool. We did get to use an air conditioner in our room at night, but that was the first time you realized you had things back home that you took for granted,” said Farley.

 

The heat, she said, was brutal. If transportation was arranged, it was tough. If not, a 15-minute walk to the bus station and an often 20-minute wait in oppressive heat followed by a ride on the non-air conditioned bus let her know quickly she was no longer home.

 

“It was a crazy eye opener and the first of many because you start missing so many random things, even a dishwasher,” said Farley. “There were a lot of eye-opening moments.”

 

While she said Brazil is a developing country with some nice home, she said most of the area she was in during her rotation would be considered on the poverty line. And as part of her rotation she would see issues she had never witnessed.

 

Amizade set up the students there in learning environments of healthcare, community service and cultural aspects. The most critical was healthcare, even though not being licensed to dispense medicine or needing a translator that spoke Portuguese made things difficult.

 

“We saw different pharmacies and I was exposed to Brazil’s universal healthcare. It’s considered a right in Brazil and I saw the good and the bad of it,” she said.

 

Farley said it was difficult to see the municipal medical facilities, which were for those receiving universal care. She said at time it was hard to see the suffering in facilities that differed from those she said that had private healthcare.

 

“There were people laying in hallways; may you could tell for a long time and like so many other places there was no air conditioning. You had rooms with eights beds in the. This was definitely another eye-opening experience,” she said. “I don’t know how universal healthcare would operate here or how it operates in other countries that have it, but anyone that saw this would want to consider something better, something more passionate. I left thinking this is something that needs to be talked about much more to see how we can get something better with healthcare reform.”

 

As for the community part of the process, it was spent at a pair of schools. The first was the Seara School, which was for younger children under six that were impoverished and couldn’t pay for education. She said it was also difficult at times to comprehend what was needed here.

 

“They even had a malnutrition clinic because most of the kids don’t eat when at home. They were provided breakfast and lunch and some children were bathed because they weren’t sure if they were being cared for at home,” said Farley. “Those are things that still weigh on my mind, but it was wonderful to interact with the children.”

 

What those children had was a pittance to what she knows she has and other youth have back in the states. And it was hard to process.

 

“They didn’t have any real toys. They had Legos that didn’t fit together and were dirty and that was about it. I kept thinking about kids here at a really young age playing on their iPads and all the stuff I have that I don’t really need. If the goal was to have you process that as the way you treat everyone, it worked. It was yet another eye opener.”

 

The other school was called Pastoral, which was for older children. There, she witnessed the less fortunate youth be taught various skills such was woodworking so they would have a chance at a career when they turned 18.

 

The enjoyable part of the trip was the cultural aspect, which had some learning involved with it as well. Twice, Farley and others involved hiked in the Amazon Rain Forest with a guide.

 

“We would stop at different trees and they explained to us how the locals would use them for medication to treat everything from malaria to inflammation,” said Farley. “You’re learning and at the same time you see parrots flying, snakes and giant fish. It was all really cool.”

 

Farley will start her residency at the Clarksburg Louis A. Johnson Veteran’s Administration at the end of June. She said the experience will help her to know her world is different from everyone else’s and she realized that not long after landing in Brazil.

 

“I’ve been on vacations in the Caribbean and you get on the airplane, get on a bus and end up at the resort where you’re treated like royalty. Here I saw what you don’t see and experienced some of the hardships they experienced and saw the hardships,” said Farley. “When I start at the VA, I know I’m going to be dealing with some homeless veterans and poverty stricken veterans and what I saw I know will help me have compassion for those individuals.

 

“What it did was show me something that will help prepare me for my career,” she continued. “I’ll take this with me through the rest of my life and hope that it benefits others.”

 

Editor's Note: Top photos shows Kaitlyn Farley after graduation with her father Norm and mother Cheryl. In the second photo, she's shown with a child at one of the schools in Brazil. Farley gets to experience a little Brazilian wildlife in the third photo, while what many would consider trash in our country is used in this lab in Brazil. Photo five shows Farley, back, with more students who loved getting their picture taken. At the bottom, one of the many large trees found in the rain forest. All photos courtesy of Kaitlyn Farley.