TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - “I had never been in a place before where God was everywhere,” University of Alabama student Ashley Ragsdale said of South Africa, where she recently spent 15 days as the state’s only delegate in the National Youth Leadership Forum’s International Mission on Medicine.

Ragsdale, a Huntsville native and member of that city’s Willowbrook Baptist Church, said it was difficult to imagine so much pain and so much beauty in the same place. “I’ve never seen so many wonderful, beautiful, friendly people. We saw many people who were living in filth and were coming up to us and asking for shoes, but yet they were the happiest of people. You see the most peaceful faces.”

The point of the program was to educate students on the staggering medical issues facing South Africa. Ragsdale said the group visited public and private hospitals daily, talking with doctors about the conditions under which they work and interviewing patients to gauge their perceptions of health care issues.

“Every single patient we interviewed had AIDS, and they all denied having AIDS,” Ragsdale said. Most of the infected deny having the disease, as the social stigma associated with admitting it in South Africa is almost unbearable, she said.

What she saw inside the walls of some hospitals, including the level of overcrowding, was previously unfathomable, Ragsdale said. “Patients wait outside … for days,” Ragsdale said. “They wait outside, and it’s 100 degrees.”

Smoking is allowed in some hospitals and some days the norm was to see two patients sharing each hospital bed. Signs were posted along hospital walls reading, “Do not buy cures for AIDS” and “Do not leave your babies unattended, they will be stolen.”

“I got to see the best and the worst,” the biology and pre-med major said. “The doctors are so innovative. They do so much with so little.”

The visit has reinforced her plans of becoming a doctor, but it has adjusted her thinking as to the area of medicine in which she hopes to specialize. Thoughts of becoming an obstetrician/gynecologist still occupy her mind, but Ragsdale says she’s now thinking more about focusing on infectious diseases.

Not all of South Africa was bleak; in fact Ragsdale said one of the startling things was the income disparity between neighbors.

“On one side of the road, you will see mansions and directly across the road, you’ll see shacks.” She saw the country’s modern cities, which included health care facilities rivaling those in the United States, and she saw areas where 600 residents shared a single toilet.

She talks of trips in taxis where steering wheels were missing and the driver steered by grasping and turning a wrench fastened onto the steering column.

“It’s a whole different world,” said Ragsdale, who attends Tuscaloosa’s Calvary Baptist Church while at UA. “You are being placed outside of your comfort zone, outside of your culture. It really showed me how blessed I was to be from the United States.”

She said her parents were initially adamantly opposed to her taking the trip, fearing for her safety. She admitted she encountered some frightful experiences, but relied on Joshua 1:9: Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.

“I would say to myself, ‘He’s still with me in South Africa, so I’ll be fine’,” she said.