HAVANA, Cuba — Oraine Lynch got a culture shock when he moved from his St John’s Road, Spanish Town home to Havana, Cuba, two years ago.

His mission north of Jamaica marked the culmination of an objective to enroll in a top-rate university that would enable him to read for a degree in medicine.

The Kingston College old boy is preparing to begin his second of a six-year programme of study at the Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (Latin American School of Medicine or ELAM) on the outskirts of this huge north Caribbean city of two million inhabitants.

That followed one year of language training to get acquainted with Spanish, a subject that was not altogether foreign to him, having passed it at the CSEC level.

But what was foreign to him was the discipline of the Cuban people, the high level of kindness, and the relatively crime-free island that was difficult to understand at first for himself and four other Jamaican medical students who made the trek there in 2013.

The process of digesting those cultural changes was made that more difficult based on the environment in which he was raised — St John’s Road being a tough community in which the gun did the talking on countless occasions.

“This was truly a culture shock to me. When I just came to Cuba, everyone in the school was not going out, and I soon realised that Cuba was calm and peaceful,” Lynch told the Jamaica Observer in an interview.

“When I was living in Spanish Town you really couldn’t go out at night and if you did, you had to watch where you were going. So I am really amazed by what I have seen in Cuba — you walk any time of the night and there is always transportation available around the clock.

“In the Cuban society, the entire population is very united and the people are very patriotic. They are united in the sense that if one person has only a little of one stuff, but his neighbour doesn’t, he will share it with his neighbour. If you as a stranger come into their country and they do not know you, if you are lost and don’t understand Spanish, they will take time out to teach you Spanish … or if you are looking for something, they will stop what they are doing at that very moment and accompany you to the location where you want to find, and help you get the item that you need at the best price,” Lynch said of the Cuban people.

He had no idea that he would end up in Cuba, although his career path was chosen from age five, even as he was ignorant about what medicine entailed.

“My mother gave me options when I was five years old. She told me that ‘you have three occupational options … you can become a doctor, a policeman, or a teacher’. She said she didn’t want me to become a policeman because she didn’t want me to be killed, ‘so you are only left with two options now — to be a doctor or a teacher’. Without knowing who a doctor was, I, at five years old, said I wanted to become one, and from that point I have been working to be a doctor,” Lynch told the Sunday Observer.

Having successfully applied for and received a scholarship to study for the profession of his dreams, Lynch got down to finding out things about his new home for the next six years.

Success came after he scored big in 10 CSEC subjects, including the big ones of Mathematics, English Language, Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

Five CAPE Unit One passes and a similar number in Unit Two allowed him to clear the qualification bar and sit and wait for the inevitable.

His inability to pay the tuition fees for entry into the University of the West Indies made it even more compelling for him to look elsewhere to realise his boyhood dream.

“I did a lot of research about Cuba before I came here. The first thing I found out about Cuba was during history class in fourth form at KC — they taught us about the Spanish American War where Cuba was fighting for their independence from Spain and then America came in, followed by the Cuban Revolution that brought in (Fidel) Castro. I learnt more about him from where they were at to how they built up their society into what it is now.

Regarding the training, Lynch in his first year was introduced to, among other things, biochemistry, anatomy, neurology and endocrine systems.

“The training has been very interesting. They start us on the basics to ensure that we have the groundwork and build us up from there, and they even teach us different ways of studying called ‘learn how to learn’ in English. They teach us ways and techniques how to learn, how to plan our time, and how to defend our papers when we present research documents,” he said.

Lynch’s determination to succeed has kept him at the top of his university class, passing all subject areas so far with the proverbial flying colours. That determination to succeed blended well with the motto of his alma mater, ‘The Brave May Fall But Never Yield,’ as he sought to ease the pressure on his mother Olive Brown to raise two other boys — Andre, a sixth former at KC, and Stefan, who is now employed — by competing on the Jamaican work scene.

Jobs over two years at ice cream manufacturers Crazy Jim, Scotiabank, and security work at Guardsman Ltd stopped some gaps, but the objective was broader for the former Dunrobin Primary Schoolboy. He just had to get into a wider space whereby his educational ability would be converted into something tangible.

“The regular shooting in the St John’s Road area disrupted my life at times, although my mother would send us to stay with relatives in the Waltham Park and Molynes Road areas to chill and return when the war was over.

“I am concentrating on the next four years that I have in Cuba, because I understand that the course has been reduced by one year in Cuba so as to allow us to do our internship in Jamaica instead. The system is very good. You can learn from the teachers who don’t put pressure on you, but facilitate you.

“As a medical student I can walk into any hospital in Cuba and learn from the doctors on duty. There are students at my university from the Latin community, including Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, and Paraguay; African nations, among them South Africa, Chad, Democratic Republic of The Congo, Angola, Zambia, Sierra Leone, among others; while from the Pacific region there are the Solomon Islands, Fiji Islands, Palao and others. Every Caribbean island has students here and there are even 10 from the United States,” Lynch said of the medical school for foreign students only, which was started by Fidel Castro in 1998 and accommodates up to 10,000 students at any one time.

Upon his return to Jamaica, he would be inclined to offer his knowledge at the Spanish Town Hospital, which he is quite familiar with, or the Annotto Bay Hospital in St Mary, where one of his mentors — Dr Ray Fraser, who also studied in Cuba — is the Senior Medical Officer.

“Jamaica should incorporate more of the Cuban ways into their medical system to get their med system up to the standard at which it is supposed to be. I know that in Jamaica you have the clinics for the different communities. You could convert the Jamaican system into what it is in Cuba now, where first you have the patient and doctor at the community level. For every 100 patients, you have a doctor who is in charge of them. From there you have the polyclinicos, and from the hospitals you have the specilisation hospitals that deal with specific diseases. There is an institute for diabetes here that specifically deals with that disease. If you have renal problems, there is an institute here that deals with that. We in Jamaica should also concentrate more on preventative medicine and not curative medicine,” Lynch stated.