“F

irst 
impressions 
last a lifetime.”
“Go confidently in 
the direction of your dreams.”
These are the words of wisdom 
that led me toward my greatest 
adventure in medical school — an 
international rotation in Ghana. 
Pursuing my dream in another 
country created memories that 
will last a lifetime and inform who 
I am as a physician.
First Day in the Labor Ward
As I entered the labor ward at 
Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, 
I discovered a large room divided by 
thick concrete walls. Each section 
contained pleather beds covered in 
plastic tarps that patients brought 
from home. I found myself fascinated 
by the lack of equipment. There were 
no IV poles. The background noise 
was free of the familiar beeping 
monitors and inflating blood pressure 
cuffs. You would not find a large TV 
displaying continuous fetal heart 
tracings, but on each dividing wall, you 
would find a Pinard horn, a funnel-
shaped instrument used to manually 
count fetal heartbeats. Intermittently, 
I would observe Ghanaian medical 
students place their hands on mothers’ 
abdomens to count the number and 
duration of contractions in a 10-minute 
period. The results would be entered 
into a pantograph, a paper chart that 
is used to track labor progression. 
Even without the lines and monitors, 
it was incredible to witness the level of 
medical care being provided within a 
limited resource setting.
As I continued my observations, I 
discovered that all patients go through 
“natural births,” predominantly due to 
the cost of epidurals. One might expect 
the ward to be filled with yelling 
and laboring mothers crying out in 
pain, yet it was surprisingly quiet. No 
one called out and no one screamed. 
Instead, I was surrounded by women 
snapping their fingers, praying and 
humming through contractions.
As I followed a mother’s progress 
through labor, I was taken aback 
by her final delivery process. In 
the “second stage” area, there is no 
coaching, privacy or family members, 
just the mother, her midwife and 
any medical students who decided 
to observe the delivery. Though it 
was her first child, the mother was 

not coached through her delivery. 
If she did not push adequately, the 
midwife would hiss in disgust. During 
the delivery, the midwife made an 
episiotomy, a surgical cut at the base 
of her vagina to aid in the delivery, but 
the patient, unfortunately, sustained a 
second-degree tear. While repairing 
the laceration, the patient would 
pull away due to pain. Each time the 
patient moved, the midwife would 
express her anger and displeasure. 
I struggled to watch as the patient 
writhed in pain. I desperately wanted 
to console her, but it did not feel like it 
was my place. With each unwanted 
movement by the patient, the tension 
in the room built. The midwife grew 
tired and at times, even pretended 
to give up on completing the repair 
entirely. Seconds felt like hours as the 
midwife worked to close the laceration 
and reunite the mother and her baby.
First Day as First Assist
“Can I scrub on your C-section 
case?”
“Yes, of course.”
The excitement that overcame me 
was palpable, as the idea of being first 
assist was merely a dream that I had 
prior to visiting Ghana. The resident 
took me through the scrubbing 
process, which entailed the typical 
personal 
protective 
equipment, 
rubber boots and a shin-length rubber 
apron worn over our surgical scrubs. 
We then scrubbed with pieces of pink 
soap left in a dish in the scrub room. 
As the foam collected on my hands, I 
found myself reviewing the steps of 
the operation, the patient’s medical 
history and any complications she was 
at risk for perioperatively.
As we entered the operating 
room, my heart began to race with 
anticipation. I gowned and gloved 
myself and then assisted with draping. 
We then made the first incision of 
the elective C-section for a fetus with 
a genetic disorder of bone growth 
called achondroplasia. When the baby 
delivered, his appearance was typical 
of achondroplasia: frontal bossing 
and shortened upper extremities. The 
baby was carefully placed on a nearby 
table, and then the surgeon’s technique 
took center stage. He prided himself 
on minimal tissue manipulation, 
leaving the uterus inside the abdomen 
during the repair and abstaining 
from exploring the uterine cavity for 

placental remains. We finished the 
operation and the only evidence of 
our presence was a small, beautifully 
closed pfannenstiel incision.
First Day Eating Ghanaian Fufu
“Are you free for dinner? We are 
going to try fufu.”
As a first-generation Nigerian 
American, I have consumed plenty of 
fufu in my life, including the batches 
that I personally struggled to prepare. 
Ignoring my familiarity with the 
dish, I enthusiastically accepted the 
invitation. My mind drifted over the 
possible variations of Ghanaian fufu. 
Would it be made of potato, yam or 
even plantain? Would it be hard or 
soft? Sour or neutral? Though fufu, 
a staple in Nigerian and Ghanaian 
cuisine, is essentially pounded starch 
and water, it can be made in numerous 
ways. I was excited to try this twist on 
a familiar dish.
We left the medical campus and 
began our journey to a restaurant 
called 
Confidence. 
When 
we 
arrived, we each ordered the fufu 
with groundnut soup and goat 
meat, a standard in Ghanaian 
cuisine. Within minutes, the server 
placed multiple large bowls of water 
and soap on the table and instructed 
us to wash our hands. The act 
heightened the experience, as I felt 
like a native Ghanaian eating in the 
proper way. The food came shortly 
thereafter, and as the bowl was 
placed in front of me I appreciated 
the nutty brown color and aroma of 
peppers and spices. Immediately, I 
reached into the bowl with my right 
hand to fish out a piece of the fufu 
ball floating in my soap. I flattened 
the fufu between my fingers while 
simultaneously scooping up the 
soup, and then lifting it to my 
mouth. The flavors were bold, yet 
balanced; new, yet familiar; and 
most importantly, delicious.
For 
any 
student 
traveling 
abroad, I encourage you to embrace 
the unfamiliar. If you challenge 
yourself to let down your guard and 
experience life in an open, curious 
and engaged manner, you will be 
rewarded with first impressions 
that last a lifetime.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Emma Chang
Ben Charlson
Joel Danilewitz
Samantha Goldstein
Emily Huhman

Tara Jayaram
Jeremy Kaplan
Lucas Maiman
Magdalena Mihaylova
Ellery Rosenzweig
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury
Alex Satola
Ali Safawi
Ashley Zhang
Sam Weinberger

DAYTON HARE
Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

ALEXA ST. JOHN
Editor in Chief
 ANU ROY-CHAUDHURY AND 
ASHLEY ZHANG
Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

ABBIE BERRINGER | COLUMN

Believe survivors?
I 

am a woman. I am a survivor 
of sexual assault, but I don’t 
want you to simply “believe 
me” because I wrote this. Why? 
Because I believe in due process. 
I believe in “innocent until proven 
guilty.” I believe the principles of 
the American judicial system are 
ones rooted in justice.
I know that the system has flaws 
and corruption has overtaken 
parts of it. It is hard to come out 
about sexual assault for many 
reasons. Corruption within the 
system often ends up protecting 
the 
powerful. 
However, 
just 
because we know this is true, it 
does not give us the right to label 
someone “corrupt” or “guilty” 
without the evidence to support it.
It is brave to come forward. I 
didn’t come forward. In fact, what 
nearly held me back from writing 
this piece at all was the fact that I 
would have to tell my parents what 
happened to me all those years 
ago. The knowledge of how much 
it would hurt them was almost too 
much to bear. Up until now, only 
a handful of people knew what 
happened to me five years ago 
when I was just a junior in high 
school. In the days, weeks, months 
and even years after the incident, 
what kept me from talking to most 
people was a mix of complicated 
emotions: embarrassment, fear 
and an overwhelming desire to 
put the whole thing behind me. 
If I had gone to my parents, they 
would have wanted me to go to 
the police. If I had gone to the 
police, they would have opened an 
investigation. If an investigation 
was opened, one thing would 
have become abundantly clear: 
There was no evidence. It was just 
me and him in a dark room, with 
one other person who happened 
to be asleep. I woke up and he 
was touching me, but he didn’t 
rape me, so I would have no DNA 
evidence. He didn’t bruise me, so 
there would be no marks on my 
body. There were no witnesses, 
just my word against his, and I 
know that for good reason the 
justice system does not allow 
people to be convicted on hearsay.
It is sad. It is sad that I 
discovered 
that 
this 
person 
committed almost exactly the 
same 
crime 
against 
another 

friend of mine some time before 
this incident had happened to 
me. I wasn’t his first victim, and 
the sickening truth is that I will 
more than likely also not be his 
last. Yet the truth is that my word 
alone is not, and should not, be 
enough to convict him. It doesn’t 
matter what the statistics are 
on accusations of sexual assault. 
Studies quoted in Vox, the BBC 
and Vogue have already reported 
that most people who come forth 
with sexual assault accusations 
are not lying. Whether these 
studies are accurate or not, I do 
not know. However, I do know 
that it truly doesn’t matter.
As Voltaire once said, Sir 
William Blackstone echoed and 
Benjamin Franklin later co-opted: 
“it is better 100 guilty Persons 
should escape than that one 
innocent Person should suffer,” 
is a maxim that has been long 
and generally approved. I still 
believe in this maxim and I think 
that, as Americans, we all should. 
This maxim is a protection. It 
guarantees that someone who 
would seek to destroy your life on 
baseless accusations, due to some 
personal vendetta, or a desire 
to harm you for one reason or 
another cannot do that without 
creating some sort of elaborate 
plot that frames you as “guilty 
beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The truth is that tomorrow I 
could come out with a baseless 
claim against anybody, an old 
enemy, a bad professor or a former 
bully, but I am deterred from doing 
so by the fact that my baseless 
claim can do no more than hurt 
their reputation. What I fear is 
that, in this new world, where the 
push by the left is to unequivocally 
believe the accuser, this deterrence 
will exist no more. If we start 
punishing the potentially innocent 
based on nothing but accusations 
alone, then it encourages those 
who may seek to destroy someone 
else’s life to take that avenue. In the 
world of politics, the corrupt work 
by trying to ruin the lives of their 
opponents. If we don’t want the 
corrupt to win, then we can’t give 
them the chance to turn allegations 
into guilty verdicts, because that is 
exactly what they want.
Due to what I have gone 

through, it is not lost on me 
that this does and will continue 
to lead to some of the guilty 
going free. It is also not lost on 
me that there is still a culture 
of mistrust and blatant sexism 
toward women, one that has 
enabled sexual abuse to continue 
running rampant in our society 
for far too long. Because of my 
own circumstances, I am very 
likely to believe the accuser in a 
sexual violence case, and more 
than anything I want our justice 
system to punish rape crimes 
more harshly. It is a disgusting 
injustice that someone like Brock 
Turner, the guilty party in the 
infamous rape case at Stanford 
University, only spent three 
months in prison for his heinous 
crime because the judge actually 
cared that his life had been 
forever changed, as his parents 
and lawyers argued in court. His 
life should have been ruined. He 
didn’t and, in my opinion, still 
doesn’t deserve to walk free.
It physically pains me to 
think that my abuser walks 
free and that there is nothing 
even the justice system is able 
to do about it, but I know if 
my word alone could have 
convicted him that would 
have been a very dangerous 
power. I don’t want that power 
in my hands or in the hands of 
anyone else. I would rather 
see my accuser go free, even 
as tears come to my eyes as I 
write this, than to know that 
the power to ruin someone’s 
life based on an accusation 
alone has become a reality in 
the American justice system.
So, I ask us all to think about 
what we should truly believe 
in. I believe in justice. I believe 
in due process. I believe in 
evidence and “guilty beyond a 
reasonable doubt,” but I don’t 
simply “believe survivors.” It 
hurts to say that because I am 
one, and most people who say 
they are a survivor are telling 
the truth, but regardless, you 
shouldn’t believe me based on 
my word alone.

First impressions

How Trump’s got it wrong on trade

KIKI OGU | WOLVERINES ABROAD

Abbie Berringer can be reached at 

abbierbe@umich.edu.

HANNAH MYERS | CONTACT HANNAH AT HSMYERS@UMICH.EDU 

W

ith 
the 
U.S.-
China 
trade 
war 
and 
the 
sanctions 
on Iran and Russia dominating 
much of the news these days, 
U.S. trade policy has become 
the spark of much controversial 
debate. To me, this didn’t make 
much sense. Any Economics 101 
professor would have told you in 
the first week of class that trade 
benefits all. But when I looked 
into it, it seemed that there was 
a consensus among some of the 
world’s highest-ranked officials 
that free trade was not equal to 
fair trade. And so, in order to 
figure out the truth behind all of 
this, I decided to interview one of 
our own experts in international 
trade: Alan Deardorff, University 
of Michigan’s John W. Sweetland 
Professor 
of 
International 
Economics and Public Policy.
When it came to the definition 
of free trade, the answer was 
pretty obvious: in Deardorff’s 
words, 
“eliminating 
barriers 
such 
that 
trade 
could 
flow 
freely.” But fair trade was much 
more 
ambiguous. 
The 
term 
had begun to be used freely “to 
mean any trade (an individual) 
didn’t like.” For example, when a 
country subsidizes one industry 
over 
another, 
the 
industry’s 
competitors would view the 
trade as largely unfair. But if, 
say, China, decided to subsidize 
their exports, the U.S. consumer 
population would benefit, as 
“we’d get cheap stuff.” Similarly, 
if a company were to outsource 
manufacturing 
to 
a 
country 
where labor and input costs were 
cheaper, it could also be viewed 
as unfair by domestic suppliers. 
But, the real question is, if these 
allegations of unfairness were 
addressed, would trade become 
more efficient and less “unfair?” 
According to Deardorff, “that 
kind of unfair trade benefits us. 
Our country overall (would) be 
better off if we freely import from 
countries that want to sell to us, 
regardless of what determined 
the prices that they’re offering.”

That said, there is, in fact, a 
legal definition of unfair trade. 
Economic dumping occurs when 
a country exports for a price that 
is lower than the selling price 
locally. Now, this is controlled 
by laws that allow a country 
to put tariffs that would offset 
the price gap that dumping 
creates. But, that said, these 
anti-dumping duties are not 
often used by the U.S. except for 
specific cases in industries such 
as steel. Evidently, this “type” of 
unfair trade is obviously not what 
President Trump is talking about.
Rather, 
the 
current 
administration 
has 
been 
fixated on the tariffs that China 
has imposed on us, calling 
their acts of protectionism 
completely unfair and harmful 
to the U.S. Tariffs traditionally 
have 
two 
effects. 
One, 
they “raise the price to the 
(country’s) buyers,” and two, 
they “lower the price to the 
(country’s) sellers.” As long as 
the country is small, the effect 
of a tariff is localized and there 
is no change in the world price. 
However, “when a country 
becomes very large, there is the 
possibility of pushing down the 
exporter’s price.” According 
to studies done by Deardorff, 
though, “there is no country 
(not even the United States) 
that has enough share of the 
world economy (to significantly 
affect the world price).”
That said, tariffs instituted 
by countries like China do 
have the potential to affect 
U.S. producers. But, the extent 
to which our producers versus 
China’s consumers are getting 
hurt by a tariff is mixed. 
Obviously, U.S. producers will 
lobby for subsidies regardless, 
as it is in their political 
interest to do so. One popular 
case of this recently is the 
soybean industry.
With 
that 
in 
mind, 
our 
administration’s 
reaction 
in 
putting our own tariffs in place 
to combat the “inequity” created 

by the Chinese tariffs have doubly 
hurt our consumers. In fact, 
when I asked Deardorff about 
this, he said that there actually 
is a proper response to countries 
that 
have 
overstepped 
their 
boundaries by implementing high 
tariffs in filing a complaint with 
the World Trade Organization. 
The WTO would investigate the 
measure and determine whether 
the tariff is justified or not. In a 
perfect world, the United States 
should have paused, evaluated 
the conflict with China and filed 
an appropriate complaint. Rather, 
we hastily implemented tariffs 
which resulted in an escalation 
of the conflict, throwing us into 
a trade war. Neither country is 
really justified in their actions, 
and now the international trade 
scene has been turned upside 
down.
Trump seems to think that 
our trade deficit with China is 
the main cause of our conflict. 
However, trade deficits by nature 
are just a means of a company 
dealing 
with 
specialization. 
When a country buys more 
than it sells, it’s simply a matter 
of specialization and relative 
comparative advantage. Though 
trade deficits are not ideal in that 
we really should be producing for 
ourselves, there is no wrongdoing 
of China’s that is causing the 
imbalance and, according to 
economist Joseph Gagnon, “there 
is no evidence that high tariffs 
reduce (trade deficits).” 
The U.S. has unequivocally 
got it wrong on trade. We 
are sacrificing free trade in 
the name of protectionist 
policies that are isolating 
our country from the rest 
of the world and creating 
major political and economic 
harm. It doesn’t align with 
Democratic 
or 
Republican 
policy. It’s just plain wrong.

Adithya Sanjay can be reached at 

asanjay@umich.edu.

ADITHYA SANJAY | COLUMN

Kiki Ogu is an M4 at the University 

Medical School.

