Reflections on lung health from the Igbo Community in Sheffield
- Dr Ada Achinanya
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
On Saturday 27th September 2025 at 8pm, in a bright hall at St. Theresa’s Catholic School in Sheffield, I (Ada Achinanya) stood up for a brief slot at the Igbo community’s monthly meeting. The Igbo community is one of Africa’s largest ethnic groups from Nigeria. The Igbo community in Sheffield is a lively, intergenerational network of families, professionals, and elders who gather monthly to celebrate their culture, share practical support, and keep language and traditions alive. The monthly meetings double as both a social anchor and a problem-solving forum. Weddings, festivals, burials and naming ceremonies get planned alongside health talks, youth mentoring, and mutual aid. It’s a space where newcomers find footing and old-timers sustain connection.
I’d prepared a brief talk about COPD, including slides, stats, and the usual scaffolding. But looking out across the room, families in weekend clothes, aunties balancing paper plates, kids restlessly running around their parents, it felt wrong to “present at” these people. I closed the laptop and asked a different starter: “Have you ever had a situation where your lungs have demanded your attention?... Anyone?”
Fortunately, it turned out to be the right question! A few minutes melted into a twenty-minute conversation, generous, warm, and bracingly honest, because lung health is never just lungs. It’s childhood, weather, work, migration, fear, and the clever ways we adapt.
A man near the front went first. He smiled as he recalled a memory from his rural village in southeastern Nigeria, where the ground runs red with iron-rich sand. As a boy, he’d play football barefoot on that warm, powdery pitch until sunset. Then came the asthma diagnosis. The inhaler solved one problem but created another: football on sand now triggered tightness in his chest and wheezing. Imagine being a ten-year-old boy and learning that the very ground of your childhood evening football kickabouts had turned into a hazard sign. He said it matter-of-factly, but I could hear the loss in his voice. Health guidelines will tell you to “avoid triggers”. They rarely tell you that triggers can be tied to joy.
Another man described hustling through odd jobs to survive, back home in Nigeria. He worked on a construction site, where “carrying cement” wasn’t just about lifting bags. It was tearing them open, emptying the powder, mixing it by hand with sand and water. Cement dust is not gentle. He developed tight, gritty breaths and eventually needed an inhaler. Then he said something I’ve heard in different forms but never tire of thinking about: “Since coming to the UK almost eighteen years ago, I haven’t needed the inhaler.” He, however, doesn’t test his luck, no runs, no football, or anything like that, but he has golf now. Long walks instead of sprints. He adjusted the activity, the pace, the air. We talk a lot in research about “environmental exposures,” but that phrase can sound clinical. In his story, ‘environment’ meant both cement dust and a fairway at dusk. It meant choosing a sport that lets you stay in conversation with your lungs, not at war with them.
A mother spoke next, and the room leaned in. She said that her baby, when crying, would sometimes hold his breath until his tiny face and lips turned blue. The first time it happened, she felt terror. She rushed to A&E, where she was told, accurately, if not comfortingly, that some babies do this. She went home with information and adrenaline, but still no peace of mind. So, she said she was told about and bought a device called an ‘Owlet’ to track her baby’s respiratory rate at night, which had an app that monitored everything on her phone. “Even though it was so expensive, it gave me peace of mind and helped me sleep at night,” she said. Monitoring by the doctors didn’t cure anything, but this gave her a bridge back to ordinary life. As health researchers, we often frame devices as clinical tools. For parents, they are often emotional prosthetics, ways to keep the heart from living at 180 beats per minute.
As people talked, I found myself shifting my mental slides from ‘COPD’ to ‘lung health’ and then, further still, to breathing as biography. In research, we like neat categories: COPD vs. asthma, environmental vs. behavioural, risk vs. resilience. But none of the stories that evening obeyed a single box. The red sand of a village pitch is an environmental exposure. It’s also a childhood friend. Cement dust is an occupational hazard. It’s also a line item on the ledger of survival. A baby’s breath-holding spells are a paediatric phenomenon, but they’re also a mother’s midnight vigil and an app’s alarm.
We also talked about what changes when people move. Migration rearranges the air you breathe, literally and figuratively. New climates, different particulate loads, unfamiliar pollens. New jobs, new leisure, new anxieties, new health systems. For one man, relocation loosened the grip of his inhaler; for another, it changed where and how he could move his body without fear of discomfort. This matters for research design. If we recruit participants without asking about their past and present, we miss the connective tissue of their story. And if we measure outcomes without asking what activities they value, we risk “improving” the numbers while shrinking their lives.
There was a moment, half laughter, half complaint, about how public health advice can feel like a constant “no”: no dust, no exertion, no allergens, no smoke, no fun. Fair point. We owe communities guidance that says “yes” more often: yes, to swaps that protect their lungs without stripping their joy; yes, to environments that make healthy choices default; yes, to sports that invite pacing, pauses, and regular breathing. Golf, as that man suggested, is one answer. Others suggested that walking is another easy option, and another said singing in a choir also counts for them, because it promotes breathing regulation and encourages social interactions. (I didn’t lecture; I just listened, because this was not the night for that, but it’s the homework I took back to my desk.)
Somewhere around minute twenty, the chairman glanced at the clock. The porters needed to close the hall. We could have talked for another hour, easily, about second-hand smoke, cultural beliefs around wheezing, the long wait for diagnostic clarity back home, the TikTok doctors, and the small hacks families invent to get through winter when they’ve relocated. But meetings run on both curiosity and courtesy, and we were already pressing on the latter.
We wrapped up with food and drinks. The secretary asked about the dues to be paid, and receipts were pocketed, while the hum of conversations that always seem to get richer precisely when the formal agenda ends continued. Several people came up to me afterwards to continue the conversation, some with questions, while others shared stories that didn’t quite fit the topic but were equally interesting to hear. Those subtle minutes are where trust grows: no slides, no acronyms, just humans comparing notes on how to keep air moving in and out their lungs.
On the way home, I thought about what it means to “engage” as a researcher in this setting. It’s easy to celebrate discussion because it feels good (and it did). But the real test is whether the stories change how we work.
Here is what I felt the evening demanded of me:
Start with lived experience, not labels. If I say “COPD,” but you say, “dust on the football field,” the work is to braid those two truths, not to replace one with the other.
Measure what matters. Spirometry and other tests like it are important, but so is whether you can walk the length of a golf course without fear.
Design for “yes.” When advice removes joy, people abandon it. When it preserves or relocates joy, it tends to stick.
Name environments. Ask about the red sand, the cement, and the British winter. Ask about the choir, the mosque, or the bus route.
Return the favour. Communities lend us their stories; we owe them feedback and fixes, not just findings.
I arrived with a talk about COPD and left with a sharper map of lung health that stretches from village football pitches to construction sites to city green golf courses. The evening reminded me that we don’t breathe in isolation. Every breath is social, historical, and personal. Research should be, too. But if there’s one thing that night taught me, it’s this: when we let people talk about their lungs, they point us toward solutions we can actually live with.
Author
Dr. Ada Achinanya
