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Detroit is rich in culture and history, but its challenges are legend. One of the poorest U.S. cities, it bears an unemployment rate twice the national average. The slow-moving hurricane of the U.S. auto industry’s decline further threatens the city’s already crisis-level economy.

But what impressed Sunaina Nanda most when she first laid eyes on Detroit on September 1, 2006, was the lushness of the trees lining many city streets and the brightness of the lawns, even at homes in obvious need of repair.

“It’s so green everywhere,” she repeatedly exclaimed, adding an observation that may seem even more incredulous to many Americans: “And so clean.”

To understand Nanda’s perspective, you must know that the 23-year-old had arrived just days earlier from Gandhinagar, India, to study human nutrition in the School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences. She was accustomed to piles of rubbish lining the dusty brown streets of her homeland, and animals as large as cows roaming freely. Over the past year, she had spent several months doing relief work in tsunami-devastated areas of southern India—traversing barren vistas that stood as yet another startling contrast to a major American city, even a poor and troubled one.

Nanda’s firsthand look at Detroit came courtesy of the SPH Office of Public Health Practice, which sponsored the school’s first-ever “Practice Plunge” on the Friday after new-student orientation. Sixty students boarded buses for an intensive day of meetings with Detroit health experts and community leaders, to learn about the creative ways they tackle urban health challenges.

Activists from SPH community partners groups, such as Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, guided neighborhood tours. In east-side neighborhoods, they pointed out massive incinerators and factories producing toxic waste close to where children play. In poor and racially segregated neighborhoods like these, where the majority of residents don’t own cars (in spite of “Motor City” residency status), students saw firsthand the evidence cited in cases being made for environmental racism.

State HIV/AIDS Epidemiology Manager Eve Mokotoff, an SPH alum and adjunct faculty member, chronicled her 20 years of work in a fast-evolving field. She explained to students that she’s come to see her role as “getting the data out there correctly, and getting better data to help fight the disease” of HIV/AIDS.

At the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion, Director Phyllis Meadows discussed new campaigns to improve child and maternal health in a city struggling with lead contamination, historically inadequate vaccination rates, and high infant mortality. Meadows related the case of a 178-pound, five-foot-tall woman who recently delivered a four-pound baby, due to malnutrition from the empty calories of chips and soda. From her seat across the room, Sunaina Nanda nodded animatedly as she listened.

“Low birthweight is also a problem in India,” she later explained. “But the issues are different.” Social and cultural factors must always be considered in India, she says. There, junk food is less likely to cause malnutrition in pregnancy than are food taboos and rural superstitions, or the fact that in many households “women eat last, after the male members of families and the elders have finished.” If little food remains at the end of a meal, then women, even those who are pregnant, do not get enough to eat.

During his address to new students on the day before the Practice Plunge, SPH Dean Kenneth Warner discussed global health. Students from dozens of different countries have much to learn about public health at the University of Michigan, he said, “and others learn from them.”

And so it goes with Sunaina Nanda, who patiently put up with being questioned in her first weeks in Michigan—a place, she says, that is “a dream come true.”

Article and photos by Mary Beth Lewis, SPH web editor.

Send correspondence about this or any Findings article to the editor at sph.findings@umich.edu. You will be contacted if your letter is considered for publication.