Family adoption program in community medicine: Reflections of a medical student

Family adoption program is an activity initiated by the National Medical Commission to provide a community-based learning experience to the medical students and is executed by the department of community medicine. We are supposed to adopt five families in the 1 st year and understand their social determinants of health, explore the factors that facilitate health and cause disease, and see the families in the context of their environments and social conditions. We are also supposed to monitor the general health and advice the family on health-related issues while being facilitated by the faculty from community medicine. We are expected to follow them up till our final MBBS and continue to learn the social and cultural factors that influence heath. As a 1 st -year medical student, I went through my first posting of family adoption program. It was in a village called Kinya which is close to the Kerala-Karnataka border. Here are my reflections about how I started with some preconceived notions of the activity, about village and village life and how it changed over the process.