Writing about your home town can be tricky. Especially when some of what you write may be unflattering. For five generations my family has resided in northwest Iowa, along the shores of West Lake Okoboji in the Iowa Great Lakes region. My great grandparents bought some lakefront property from a businessman trying to make a quick buck in 1907. Over several decades they built a summer retreat with little cabins hugging the lakeshore. They bought another lot and eventually built a small family resort to which my grandparents devoted their lives, selling it only two years before my older sister was born. My father grew up on the shores of West Lake Okoboji and eventually instilled in me a similar love of the peaceful waters that run through his veins. I lived there too, until I left to study at a small college on the east coast.

This book is about balancing perspective. Although now I''ve lived far from Okoboji as long as I lived there, the community is part of who I am. I have evangelized for these waters all over the world, dropping "OKOBOJI" towels, cups, and t-shirts for mentors, friends, and colleagues. Yet, as my ideas about the world grew bigger, and my experiences deeper, how I conceive a community that gave me so much has changed enormously. Growing up in a white, conservative, and religious community creates opportunities for rebellion. The first time I was sent to the principal''s office was in middle school when my social science teacher spewed racist remarks about Native Americans. I was so angered by his comments that I got up and walked out the door. I had become interested in learning more about the Dakota who lived at the Iowa Great Lakes before white settlers colonized the land in part because my mother''s friend John Parsons was writing a book on settler stories called Okoboji Gold.

My mother is a lifelong citizen scientist devoted to local history and ecology, and John was constantly bending her ear. We had returned a few months before from a trip to Copper Canyon, where we explored the ancient-looking dwellings where some Tarahumara people reside today. It felt so foreign to my white rural American upbringing. I started reading books by authors with different backgrounds than my own, like Sandra Cisneros''s The House on Mango Street. I was also not unaware of my privilege: I had close friends who periodically experienced hunger at home, or stayed with my family when their own homes were unsafe for them. When I left home to attend Davidson College, my unfamiliarity with the way things worked made me realize how little I knew about the world. I had to relearn American and world history because what I learned growing up had been a heavily edited version; I read people''s stories and histories from the perspective of those who lived it in courses in literature, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Also, I realized that people live in very different cultural contexts, even in the United States: many of my classmates came from private schools or wealthy southern families that were very different from mine.

I''m a happy-go-lucky type of person, so I jumped in with both feet. But there were some aspects of Davidson College that made me uneasy (such as blatant differences in how students experienced the college based on race, class, gender, and sexuality). Despite my seeing and experiencing some of these things (re: sexism), as a cis-gender white female I also realized how much advantage came with the parts of my person that I could not control (as others also could not). I loved my classes, made incredible friends from around the world, and was introduced to a whole way of thinking, being, and doing. The most transformative experiences were traveling with my classmates. For instance, I traveled with a group of students to Nicaragua during my sophomore year to study liberation theology from farmers, activists, and community leaders; we studied ideas of liberation by reading poetry, prose, articles, and essays by Nicaraguan and Jesuit writers. My mentors called it a ''reverse mission trip'', meaning we would learn about how people''s political and moral struggles shaped their lives by listening to their stories. We had homestays and I slept on a mat on the floor; I remember my host''s grandmother joking that she made Starbucks lattes in the morning after milking her cow and mixing it with Nescafé.

My Spanish was awful then, but the experience transformed how I see the world as incredibly interconnected and unequal. I applied for every opportunity to travel and learn from others after that experience, and my passion for understanding the world grew. Soon after, I started reading books that brought together my curiosity in liberation theology and my passion for medicine; for first time, I was introduced to the field of medical anthropology. In the next year, I spent a month shadowing a woman who was both Machi (traditional healer) and nurse in a small hospital outside of Temuco, in southern Chile. As a Mapuche cultural broker, I learned how she spoke through cultural nuance and clinical care to ensure women in her community had safe births and healthy babies. I spent another month following a nurse-midwife in a hospital in the western province of Zambia caring for Lozi women expecting babies in a clinic that was financially strapped by caregivers who were immensely devoted and talented. I realized through this project, of listening, watching, and learning, that understanding what medicine does cannot always align with how people define health and well-being on their own terms. Although I had taken all the pre-requisites for medical school--even the entrance exam--I realized that I loved research more than anything.

I am now a medical anthropologist and professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where I often tell my students that your twenties are for becoming who you are (listening, learning) and your thirtiesare for creating (making, sharing). In my twenties I completed two graduate degrees: one in public health and another in anthropology. I spent five years in Chicago, working at Cook County Hospital, learning about how trauma can become embodied in chronic illness from Mexican immigrant women seeking care there. I also spent years living outside the United States, accruing treasured mentors and experiences in India, Kenya, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; these mentors, along with the meaningful work I''ve been privileged to do, have shaped who I am and how I see the world. I bring together these perspectives to my research, to understanding what people struggle with and where (public health) and why and how people struggle with illness differently in one place as opposed to another (anthropology). I have interviewed hundreds of people (mostly women) around the world, trying to understand what makes people sick and why.

Yet, I have never missed an Okoboji summer. Even when my visits were brief, going home was comforting in part because I grew up next door to my British grandmother (my mother''s mother), who showered me with love in her austere and proper way. After her husband died in her early fifties, she returned many times to London to visit her family, while also traveling around the world during the bitter cold prairie winters in Iowa. She inspired in me a passion for understanding places far away from my home, even when many people around me remained somewhat insular. We stayed very close until she died, just six weeks after my youngest daughter was born. Since she passed away, I have had a difficult time connecting with my home. But when coronavirus spread throughout the world, and my family became integral to the COVID-19 response in Dickinson County in the Iowa Great Lakes region, my personal and professional life came together. This crisis drew me back to the community.

This book is the story of what happened during one Okoboji summer when a pandemic reached northwest Iowa, forcing the community to face a global challenge. My research and writing about this challenge cannot be divorced from my professional and personal identities. I work and live in a global community of scholars and policymakers who are constantly discussing how people, viruses, histories, and politics are interconnected. I continue to dedicate my professional life to understanding these challenges. Yet, I come from a place that can be frustratingly insular and isolationist, even though it certainly is not an island, bubble, or escape from reality. My family lives there, and is deeply embedded in this community--giving hours of their time to community service, investing in the future of the community''s children, and carefully monitoring the waters to ensure the future generations can safely live in and on the sacred shores. I recognize and honor the advantages the community has given me--the wealth my family gained by purchasing land before tourism drove up property values, growing up in a tight-knit community where I knew people cared for me, and having a public school system that enabled me to achieve my goals. But there is still a need to understand and critique the devaluation of life that emerged during the summer when people faced an extraordinary question in the face of a virus: How do we care for each other?.