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Finding My Voice: Dr. Sarona's Journey from Shy Student to Championing Adolescent Health in Africa
What is your personal/professional story?
Dr. Sarona Mathware is a board-certified pediatrician with a special interest in adolescent health and mental health and is currently the medical director at Morgan Urgent Care Center with Driscoll Children's Hospital in Corpus Christi Texas. She also runs the African Students Abroad Health and Counseling Consultants, a consultancy assisting families and students preparing to move and settle abroad, providing guidance as students navigate this critical transition.
Tell us about your personal and professional journey.
I completed medical school at St George's Medical School in Grenada, West Indies, and did my residency at Maimonides Children's Hospital in Brooklyn NY. I have a BS in Exercise Physiology from West Virginia University, WV.
My professional life has mainly been in primary care, with the highlight being when I opened and operated my private practice clinic in Gaborone, Botswana from 2014 - 2021. As much as I now enjoy urgent care, I miss the relationship-building in primary care, especially adolescent health and mental health.
I was an international student when I moved to the USA in 1996 and my son was an international college student while I was in Botswana. Seeing the hardships that parents and students face when students move internationally, and knowing that Africans are for the main part very private about their struggles and successes, I decided to use my professional and personal experience to launch African Students Abroad Health and Counseling Consultants to help both students and parents successfully navigate the early college years.
I believe that students, families, African student organizations, offices of international studies, and sponsors need to educate and fully support the whole person, including families left back in Africa.
What key moments in your life led you to where you are today?
I never considered myself a shy person but when I got to medical school, and maybe in undergrad as well, I found myself quiet in most classroom discussions. I guess seeing lecturers and student nodding their heads when I felt they were listening more to my accent than the content, made me lose my confidence. One day in 3rd year of medical school during mid-rotation feedback, one physician said to me, 'Sarona, you need to learn to speak up more during rounds. I know you are smart but if you don't speak up no one will ever know it.' What brought it home for me was when he said, 'I have been to Botswana, and I know Batswana are very humble and modest people. Here in the USA, you have to showcase yourself.'
That changed everything for me - this was someone who knew my home country, and validated that I am smart!
I am still a bit quiet but my confidence took a major boost that day in 2003.
Where does your passion to serve come from?
UBUNTU (I am because we are): I doubt that as Africans we consciously practice Ubuntu, but once we leave the continent and live away from the collective sense of community, we understand how we lived: the collective sense of 'my neighbor cannot go hungry while I have excess', the collective sense of 'I am because we are.'
I therefore have passion for other's well-being, I do not like hunger, I do not like poverty, I do not like suffering, not for myself and not for anyone else.
How can GlobalMindED help you reach your goals?
GlobalMindEd will give me a platform to reach marginalized students, not necessarily because of color, economic status, or age, but by the mere fact that they are different, speak differently, and present themselves differently. When others can see themselves in my life experiences, and know they can come back as motivators and cheerleaders for others, I will have succeeded.
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