A representative team of six ASPPH staff visited East Tennessee State University (ETSU) College of Public Health (East Tennessee) to participate in their Project EARTH Experience. Two of the public health experiences focused on teamwork, innovation, and resiliency and were led by Dean Randy Wykoff and Dr. Mike Stoots, with the goal of teaching the skills needed to protect and promote health and well-being in resource-limited settings.

On the Eastman Valleybrook Campus of ETSU, the first experience was the Otzi Experience, where teams of two built shoes with minimal supplies of leather, cardboard, and string. Requiring creativity, teamwork, and manual labor, this resulted in three pairs of shoes that were not quite usable but helped the team experience working with limited resources.

Next was the Tortilla Experience, where the team cleared a 10×10 piece of land, built a fence to keep animals out, planted corn and beans, and built a stove to cook the food on—all with limited supplies. The group learned how challenging it is to build a farm that could enable generations of families to prepare and eat food.

The team also toured replica houses that were built by students to show different kinds of housing around the world, including in South Africa, El Salvador, and Mongolia. These experiences taught the team about the challenges of basic public health in places with limited resources and demonstrated ways to be resilient. East Tennessee’s experiential program transformed the ASPPH perspective on public health in places with limited resources.

View images of the trip here.