We were lucky to catch up with Eda Alp recently and have shared our conversation below.

Eda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

Healthcare isn’t universal.
This was the harsh wake-up call I received in an Ethiopian village when I was sixteen years old. In a settlement of a tribe, tall acacias stood against vibrant orange African sunset. The wind silently grazed the village huts, and I was merely a tourist—until I wasn’t.

I noticed that the babies of the village all had their eyes closed, constantly. Not one baby had their eyes open, and they all cried.
I took a closer look into their little faces and understood why these babies could not see—they couldn’t see their mothers’ faces, the orange of the African sunsets, or the stars that filled their night skies.

A tribe has a distinctive hairstyle that involves curling the hair with a mixture of butter and clay. When a mother carries her baby in her arms, this liquid mixture on her hair often drips into the baby’s eyes, causing painful eye infections they cannot voice. My doctor friend Anna and I got to work. We cleaned eyes for hours. We were deep in Africa, in the middle of this dusty terrain, and all we had were our cars—the nearest city was hundreds of kilometers away. With first aid kits gathered, we started treating the babies. Anna selected the proper ointments, gauze, and taught me how to clean the babies’ eyes. It was the first time I had held a child and the first time I had ever cured a human.

Seeing the first baby’s eyes open after I gently cleansed them was my defining moment. She could see. She stopped crying, blinked, and looked into my face in wonder, like a blind person seeing colors for the first time. At that moment, I understood that I wanted to spend a lifetime doing exactly this. Medicine was a calling, it was my purpose—I wanted to cure.

But I wanted to cure here, specifically. I wanted to be a doctor in Africa.
In the passenger seat of our robust Land Cruiser on my way back home, I opened the window, took in the cool wind of the Ethiopian night, and reflected on the years I had lived here. I thought of the African mountains I had climbed, the warm Ugandan rivers I had swum in, the tiny planes I had flown over Kenya. I belonged to this continent and knew the only thing I could love more than medicine was Africa.
I belonged entirely to this life, to this land, and to this life purpose.

That day was my first step in my medical journey: a silent evening spent healing with the view of an African sunset. Four years later, I now study medicine and write for The Call of East Africa, my travel blog, an immersive portal to my life in Africa.

I discovered in this Ethiopian village that healthcare wasn’t universal. With the knowledge I have today, I understand how exponentially fast medicine is advancing, and I see the opportunities in using innovative technology to create tools that will revolutionize public health. I believe artificial intelligence and HealthTech can be pillars for underserved communities, travelers, and people who live in high-risk areas. Technology can take humanity one step closer to a utopia where healthcare is as accessible as air. In the present and near future, this world is one where AI enables doctors and individuals to identify health risks earlier and provide preventive care, which can be life-saving in areas where healthcare resources are limited.

I am passionate about using AI in healthcare in my upcoming projects, as I believe that with the resources we have today, I do not have the luxury to pursue a traditional road in medicine: I am impatient to discover and create tools that incorporate technology into global health, hoping to address the gaps I first witnessed in Africa.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am Eda Alp—a travel writer, adventurer, medical student, and the founder of The Call of East Africa, my travel blog. I was an expat in East Africa, based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Kampala, Uganda for four years. Through my blog, I share the years I spent in Africa, from Sunday afternoons reading in my Ethiopian garden to days hiking with mountain gorillas in the Ugandan rainforests.

My dual purpose is to offer both practical travel advice and itineraries for travelers and locals in East Africa, helping others experience the life I’ve lived, and to write immersively, making readers discover, hear, smell, see, and feel the beauties of Africa.

My years in Africa were the best of my life, thanks to my mother and her meticulous planning. She would wake up each day thinking, “How can we make this the best day of our lives?” and often succeeded in creating grandiose memories all across the Horn of Africa. I’ve put all those experiences into words on The Call of East Africa.

My teenage years were eventful, attending high school in Ethiopia, traveling the continent, rafting the Nile, hiking in the Ethiopian highlands, going on safaris in Kenya, snorkeling in Tanzania… Four years of adventure are encapsulated in my articles, which go from itinerary lists to poems to memoirs, effectively making The Call of East Africa an immersive portal to a vibrant, colorful life spent in this unfamiliar, splendid region.

Medicine is a natural extension of this journey. Driven by a fascination with health and the resilience of communities, I see medicine as the most profound way to contribute to the world. It allows me to explore, to serve, and to innovate—each step fueled by a desire to help others live fully, wherever they are.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

“A healthy man has a thousand thoughts; a sick man only has one.”
Inspired by Confucius, this is a powerful realization I had.

Medicine, for me, is about giving people thousands of thoughts. In a society where people are sick, the space for thought is absent. A society that can only survive cannot develop, cannot create art, cannot love. I am happy to have committed myself to a profession where I can give people the health they need to enjoy life.

In medicine, we can give people thousands of thoughts in so many different ways: hospital work, fieldwork, humanitarian aid, technology and engineering, politics, activism, curiosity of science, and so much more. These endless possibilities all work together to create healthcare, and this complexity is what makes medicine so interesting to me.

In my case, I believe medicine benefits my personal life because it allows me to satisfy my scientific curiosity; it allows me to travel to Africa for my internships and rotations; it develops my critical thinking skills; it pushes me to use my knowledge for immediate problem-solving, which is most thrilling.

Most of all, medicine allows me to scale up healing. My medical skill set gives me an immense advantage in entrepreneurship because it allows me to go into the HealthTech world with a real purpose and vision. With my upcoming projects, I see how I can simplify preventive health with artificial intelligence by creating tools that can ultra-tailor health to individuals and communities. In a world where data is massive, the amount of patterns is also massive. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can save lives by recognizing patterns: whether through early detection of skin cancers or identification of pathological genetic predispositions, I am so grateful to be born in this era of medicine. I am impatient to use innovative tech to give thousands of thoughts to communities and societies, using pattern recognition and identifying risks specifically tailored to every individual and their risk factors.

Yes, I would choose medicine over and over again.

A lesson I had to unlearn was being disciplined.
I know it sounds counterintuitive: when navigating medical studies, creative writing, my brand, and entrepreneurial projects, one would expect a tremendous amount of discipline.

Something I realized in medical school is that when we enter this field, most of us think that medicine wants robots who will dedicate all mental energy and free time to studying.

As I delved into artificial intelligence, I noticed that the way we learn medicine is nearly identical to the way we train AI. Our job is to learn and understand massive amounts of data (hence why our studies often last more than six years) to recognize patterns (symptoms) and diagnose. This is a parallel with AI, which is trained with massive amounts of data to recognize patterns and create an output.

I do not believe that AI can replace doctors in any way; however, the similarity in which we approach knowledge and data makes it a companion and tool for enhanced care.

The point is, we have tools in medicine that are already robots. We don’t need to become robotic ourselves. Why torture ourselves and dedicate every minute of our lives to textbooks when real innovation in medicine happens when we let curiosity, inspiration, and scattered minds flow?

The moment I unlearned the unhealthy discipline of restricting myself to only my medical textbooks to become the most scholarly doctor I could be was the moment I set myself on a path to become the most innovative doctor I could be.

Interdiscipline mixes well with medicine. When I lost discipline, I spent hours wandering around Wikipedia’s articles about artificial intelligence. When I lost focus, I spent hours scrolling through pictures of my time in Kenya. When my textbooks bored me, I started online courses on public health and business. I stopped resisting the interesting distractions and embraced this messy curiosity that I used to think would be condemned in medicine.

But the thing is, I studied what I had to study with a couple of coffees and late nights afterward, excelling in my exams and accomplishing my academic duties anyway. It was those bursts of distraction that led me to success: the dots all connect at the end, and it is those distractions that spark life-changing ideas. In my case, it sparked the idea for my current medical entrepreneurial pursuit, which merges artificial intelligence for preventive health in third-world countries and high-risk environments. The mania that comes with the desire to heal and create came from the distractions. The moment I trusted myself in learning what I had to learn for medical school and let go of the robotic discipline that made me feel ashamed of my hobbies and inquisitiveness, I had the space to think and create.

Desire and curiosity have proven to be my most sustainable sources of committed and inspired work, far more than robotic discipline ever could. Ultimately, medicine and everything it captures is fascinating. It’s okay to indulge in curiosity and remember what it is all about- knowing more, discovering more, innovating more, to help more.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thecallofeastafrica.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecallofeastafrica/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eda-alp
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@edalppp