Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

Another one of the ways to enter fire or light or whatever brings you happiness is to call it by name over and over the deep breath you take.

When you know you are so many, and the same light from the sun blazes for you as it blazes for everyone in Ghana, or India, then you will go through this familiar life doing these three key things Mary Oliver noted we all do: pay attention, be astonished and tell about it.

Today, I paid attention to the critical juncture we find ourselves with this world of implementation science research as we know it and the current administration. I was astonished about how one of the goals for our live’s work with health is as simple as these three key points with health as shared by one powerful, eloquent leader of our time: 1) the world needs your work; 2) science needs your work; 3) the future needs your work.

Finally, I did my best to tell about my experience by humanizing the field as I know best. See I am a grant writer, a storyteller, wife, mother, sister, friend passionate about people and how we make our health interventions last.

I don’t have the answers and I have failed tremendously trying to do this work, but I’m here and will always ask, how can I help. I hope to continue to share how I learn from failure, learn from its lessons, learn from what I have earned or the costs failure brings. There are assets I revisit time and time again with each failure and some I know to recalibrate for good just so I navigate once more what it means to make things last. I prefer to humanize the work I do in implementation science because we are running out of time.

Just today, another 22 women will die from cervical cancer, something we have known how to address since 1999, with HPV screening or 2006 with HPV vaccines. We don’t have time to waste. My sister in-law died in 2021 because we didn’t get evidence based interventions around HPV to her. It matters to me that we eliminate cervical cancer and for me, the stories we tell about implementation science are all I intend to do in the space I lead, where we do our part to create an unforgettable fury of light to this field and thing called global health. It’s not perfect, but we are perfecting our imperfect stories with learning from failure with this field and yes keep this!