This story is courtesy of Daniel Eddy, Health Sciences Communications Intern, College of Public Health. Excerpts are below.

Alison Norris, professor of epidemiology in Ohio State’s College of Public Health, and her husband, Thomas McDow, assistant professor of history traveled to Africa last summer with their three children: Maggie, 13, Franklin, 10, and Solomon, 8.

Joining them were Alison’s sister, Abby Norris-Turner, an infectious disease epidemiologist in the College of Medicine, and Abby’s two children: Charlotte, 8 and Cyrus, 6.

Norris has studied in the world’s second-largest continent since she was in undergraduate school when she fell in love with East Africa. She knew she wanted to continue researching in that part of the world.

Over the next couple of years she would travel back and forth from the U.S. to Africa until she was pregnant with Maggie. Norris gave birth to Maggie in the U.S. then left for Africa four months later.

“People would say, ‘You’re taking your baby to Africa? Does that make you worried?’ And my answer would be ‘Well there are lots of babies in Africa. She will be fine,” Norris said.

Norris didn’t have to make the trips solo since her husband studies the Indian Ocean region and travels to East Africa or nearby areas. Norris said she has been lucky with her children never being sick or having a serious accident while researching abroad and considers East Africa to be like a very rural part of the U.S. in the sense that help might take longer to reach, but is still accessible.

McDow’s studies track migration of Africans into Omen and also tracks both free and slave Africans into the Indian Ocean realm.

“We have chosen to pursue scholarly careers because we like doing research abroad, we like speaking in other languages, seeing how others see the world, trying to understand things that aren’t our own things,” McDow said. “And our kids have had to learn some of those things. I think we have been fortunate because they seem to have enjoyed it, and there are aspects of being in East Africa that they really like.”

Traveling and living in Africa has become a routine matter for Norris’ children who have lived in Africa for a year at a time and even went to school and spent their summers in Africa.

“They are very comfortable there,” Norris said. “They don’t think anything extraordinary about packing up and spending their summer in East Africa.”

This summer presented an opportunity for Norris and Norris-Turner to work together on the same project. Norris-Turner wanted her children to experience a different culture and to be away from home.

Norris has learned that Africa is unpredictable, which has helped her children be resilient to unexpected changes.

Once the family completed their long travel from the U.S. to Lilongwe, Malawi, the real work and research could begin. The sisters collaborated by setting up a new research study that will examine how people make decisions around sexual and reproductive health.

“It was really fun to have the kids with us,” Norris-Turner said. “Instead of a commute, or swinging by a daycare, we just walked out of the clinic building and across the street. So we could have breakfast, lunch and dinner all together.”

“I think of family as a unit,” McDow said. “The fact that my own family has moved around together and Alison and I have supported each other in the research that we have been doing overseas seems like a natural extension of the research that I do.”