In 2021, I began carrying what felt like a small but steady flame—a vision of public health that was more than a professional title. In the hills of Meghalaya, India, where beauty and burden exist side by side, I learned that my work was not only about data or reports. It was about healing that reaches beyond charts and protocols, into the fragile spaces where fear and denial quietly coexist.
Between hospital walls and distant villages, I encountered more than illness. I witnessed how tradition, financial hardship, and long journeys shaped decisions about care. I saw families sit with diagnoses that altered their future. Public health, I came to understand, is not only prevention strategies or surveillance systems. It is standing at the intersection of science and humanity—where research meets compassion.
On World Cancer Day, I wrote about the landscape and the burden it carries. This is about the calling behind those realities.
Over time, my understanding deepened. Faith did not compete with science; it sustained me within it. When fear kept people from seeking screenings, it was not statistics that moved them, it was trust: trust built through listening longer than required, through explaining gently, through walking beside someone as they chose courage over denial.
There were no dramatic milestones—only small, steady steps forward. What began as responsibility was becoming vocation, a calling quietly finding its fulfillment.
In that stillness, I recognized what I can only describe as divine intervention—not in spectacle, but in guidance, a stirring within that affirmed I was exactly where I was meant to be.
Public health in these hills moves without fanfare. But its greatest victories are often the quiet ones.
Favour Rubyson Kharnaior
Meghalaya, Shillong, India
