It was a combination of doing community-based research for a summer service project for the Service Opportunities in Leadership Program, an interest in global and cross-cultural health in Duke’s Global Health Institute, and participation in Suzanne Shanahan’s class on ethical and health-related issues surrounding refugee resettlement that Benjamin Duke Scholar Rui Jiang found herself talking about food with Bhutanese refugees who had recently resettled in Durham.

Jiang spent the summer as part of the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ Working Group on Bhutanese Refugees, doing language tutoring through Church World Service and researching how family eating habits and food customs change with resettlement.

“I wanted to know how resettlement had affected the health and food traditions of this group of people,” she says. “What kinds of foods are they eating here? What are the factors that are changing their food habits and practices?”

She describes how the refugees had a very specific diet in the camps because their food was provided to them in rationed distributions. Jiang went into her research thinking she might find signs of food insecurity. “I wondered if the refugees were worried about having enough food here, about where their food would come from, about whether there were safe and available means of obtaining food.” In fact, she says she found quite the opposite. “They felt there was more than enough readily available food.”

She also found that the refugees’ food ways were evolving based on their surroundings in more complex ways. “Parents told me they wanted their kids to like American food, mainly out of their excitement to become a part of the culture here,” Jiang says. “Unfortunately, with the most widely-distributed American foods being French fries, hamburgers, and pizzas, and by not having someone to show them other options, they’ve come to know fast food as the only American foods to introduce to their children.”

Jiang also witnessed the shifting of power dynamics within families based on food. “Children are learning English at a faster pace than their parents. It seems to me that they are playing a much larger role in making decisions here—what foods to eat, what food to purchase—than they did in the camps in Nepal.”

Looking back, Jiang says she didn’t expect ethics would play a significant role in her research. “I didn’t realize how much it would come up,” she says. “I think about how the research will eventually help the refugees and their community here, but that the effects won’t be immediate. In the meantime, that’s at the cost of my taking time away from them when they are trying to survive in a new place—in school, in their jobs. Our discussions about research ethics really opened my eyes to those competing interests.”

Jiang plans to take that knowledge with her as she explores new paths. “I really appreciate having worked with the refugees. I’m currently applying to medical school, but I know that the reason that I want to practice medicine or advocate for public health is because of the contacts and the relationships that I have built through this work.”

“I find it valuable to know first-hand the challenges that these refugees face and to experience the realities that we as researchers face. I hope to take the observations that I made concerning how vulnerable populations lack access to preventive and primary care and write a portfolio with policy recommendations.”

Rui Jiang is a senior at Duke University majoring in chemistry and pursuing a certificate in global health.

To read the stories of other students doing ethics work here at Duke, click here.