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ALUMNI SPOTLIGHTS
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ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT Second Act
Pro basketball player Jesse Chuku ’12 chases a different score.
As a professional basketball player, Jesse Chuku ’12 was pursuing a career that many young athletes aspired to live. After a successful Division I career at Lehigh University, Chuku played professionally in Greece and Italy before returning to England for a position with the Leicester Raiders. Then COVID-19 cut the 2019-20 season short.
With two months left in the season and stuck inside his London apartment, Chuku returned to an old hobby, making videos. “It’s something I used to do, but I haven’t really shown people the videos I made,” he says. “I felt my identity was always a basketball player and people wouldn’t take me seriously. Then I just said, ‘Why not?’ When COVID hit, I felt like it was a good time to try my talent.”
Chuku began sharing comedic videos that highlight Anglo-American miscommunication and cultural differences through the social network TikTok. His videos draw upon personal experiences from his six years in the United States and his knack for mimicking an American accent. His humor and charm struck a chord, and he’s racked up 1.8 million TikTok followers.
In March, he was one of 12 artists recognized by London’s Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund with an award of £10,000—roughly $14,000— and an acting mentorship. Honored as a “TikTik Breakout” artist, Chuku soon signed on with an agent and began auditioning. “When I look back it seems surreal, but I’m used to putting my mind to something.”
Chuku says his time at Kimball Union was a catalyst for his creativity. After arriving at the school to pursue his dream of playing basketball in America, Chuku landed in the hospital with persistent, flu-like symptoms. He spent significant time in the ICU after being diagnosed with Lemierre’s syndrome, a rare illness in which a bacterial infection spreads into the tissue and forms a blood clot in the jugular vein.
His doctor was convinced Chuku’s basketball career was over. “My experience at KUA of getting sick really developed my character,” he says. “I was able to fight something so serious and had someone who was involved in saving my life.”
Now he has turned another challenge into an opportunity. With auditions coming in and a modeling career underway, he opted not to sign for another season with the Raiders. Instead, he plans to pursue acting and film production.
“I still love basketball. It’s in me now,” says Chuku. “I played for the England junior national team, played DI in college, and no one recognized me. Since all this happened, everyone recognizes me and people stop me on the street and say, ‘You make those funny videos on TikTok—keep doing what you’re doing.’” K
Follow Chuku on TikTok @chewkz.
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EXPANDING ACCESS
Workers with Mass General’s First Mile program construct a COVID treatment center in Uganda last spring.
ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT Reaching the Most Vulnerable
Emily (Cable) Yale ’09 takes on global health inequity.
Severe COVID-19 is devastating industrialized nations. But what chance do people have in regions where the nearest doctor is hours away and can be reached only on foot?
That’s the kind of predicament Emily (Cable) Yale ’09 faced daily in her role as program manager for Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health’s First Mile, a community health initiative in Mbarara, Uganda.
“We supported teams of community and frontline health workers bringing lifesaving services to the doorsteps of people far from care,” Yale says. “We worked in rural villages where the terrain is impossible. It’s seven hours from Entebbe, and you can’t even get to people’s homes except on foot or sometimes by motorcycle.”
Yale, who holds a master’s in public health from Boston University, has devoted her career to expanding access to medical care in some of the world’s most inaccessible communities. She always knew she wanted to help people, but she wasn’t sure how. “I didn’t know what global health was,” she laughs. After one class as an undergraduate at Elon University, she was hooked. “I’d been interested in pursuing nutrition and obesity,” she explains. “But then I took a global health class that made me realize that obesity was a small program on the global scale.”
Yale managed HIV and maternal health programs in six countries in Africa before joining the First Mile program.
At first, COVID-19 spread slowly in sub-Saharan Africa. But the virus itself wasn’t the biggest problem. “You had to read between the lines to see what was really going on,” Yale explains. “The roads were shut down by the government and no one was allowed to drive. For patients who needed HIV medication dispensed several times a week, this became a real problem.”
While Yale handled logistics from Boston, her team prepared for COVID-19 outbreaks, building a 58-bed hospital unit that more than tripled the region’s capacity. These days, the virus is pervasive there, Yale reports, though reliable information is hard to come by. “There is essentially no monitoring and testing.”
While vaccines are rolling out in the United States and Europe, distribution in Africa will take years. And the other impacts of COVID-19 will last even longer. “The pandemic has wiped out a lot of progress—we’re going back 10 years in a lot of areas of global health,” Yale says.
In February, Yale joined a team at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital focusing on global health initiatives aimed at addressing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes and sickle cell anemia in the developing world.
To some, the task may seem insurmountable—but that’s exactly what keeps Yale going. “In global health,” she says, “the challenges and inequities these communities face is far greater than anything domestic. Being able to reach the most vulnerable and marginalized people is amazing.” K
