In the evenings after class, Deborah Akinniyi packs up her bags to go to work in a part of D.C. that most GW students never see.

Cigarette butts litter the streets, signs offering quick cash for paychecks and promises of stimulus money yet to come decorate the part of Seventh Street near Bread for the City, the free clinic where Akinniyi, a second-year medical student, works with the city’s underprivileged.

Bread for the City provides a variety of free programs for eligible D.C. residents, including food and clothing distribution, primary medical care, legal advice and representation, and comprehensive social services, according to their Web site.

In D.C., where more than one in four children was living in poverty in 2008, according to the Washington Post, Bread for the City offers a hope for those who “just can’t make ends meet,” says nurse Julie Gree.

Akinniyi is part of a group of GW students, mostly from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, who learns hands-on medicine at the clinic, treating patients for their diseases – both of the body and the mind.

“We teach patients about their diseases,” Akinniyi said. “We give them suggestions they can take into the future.”

Gree said most of the medical patients that come into Bread for the City need help managing their diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension, but added that students have to work “with the emotional aspects of the city’s underserved.”

Those emotions can be hard to overcome, Akinniyi said. Recalling her first patient – a young transgender lesbian woman with a history of sexually transmitted infections and hypertension who lived in an abusive household – Akinniyi said she had as many social and economical issues to treat as she did body issues.

What overwhelmed Akinniyi, she said, was the trust this young woman had in her, even though they had never met.

“She trusted me because she trusted Bread for the City,” Akinniyi said. “She told me, ‘As long as the doctor is here, I’m fine with you.’ “

For the students, Bread for the City gives them a real-life look into what public health care could be and why, they say, America needs more primary care doctors.

“Primary prevention is a focus here, we want to prevent the diseases that are killing people,” Comfort Amoh-Tonto, a fourth-year medical student, said.

Amoh-Tonto and Akinniyi both said the D.C. public health care option could be a model for the nation’s proposed health care reform, if the national plan included incentives for doctors to go into primary care.

“We live in a system that incentivizes specialties,” said Alex Rivero, a first-year medical student. “If we had a system that encouraged primary care, patients would be able to get the care they need.”

Of the seven GW students working last Tuesday night, only Akinniyi said she was certain she would go into primary care. Amoh-Tonto said working at Bread for the City was reminding her of her love for helping the underserved.

“It reminds you why you want to go into medicine,” she said.