How Our 2010 Grantees Empowered and Advanced Their Host Communities

3 minute read

Alexandria B.
Cochabamba, Bolivia

Alexandria worked with Instituto para el Desarrollo Humano, which works to develop social and preventative medicine while promoting gender equity and basic human rights for the HIV/AIDS community in Bolivia.

As part of my experience, it is required that I create a sustainable project that aids the institution in fulfilling their purposes. I dedicated my time to creating two projects that had both educational and preventive components in order to increase the likelihood of sustainability.

Daphne A.
Lima, Peru

Daphne volunteered with Partners In Health, an organization that supports multi-drug resistant tuberculosis patients in Lima.

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I began to assume the responsibilities associated with the workforce reinsertion project until I was eventually coordinating and administering it. This was an extraordinary learning experience. I was charged with systemizing the project’s processes, selecting beneficiaries, orienting beneficiaries in developing their education and work goals, designing and offering a series of workshops (a terrifying but positive experience), monitoring the beneficiaries’ progress in the program, and supporting the development of a project proposal for the income generation team that would last for the next two years.

Through these activities I have learned more than I expected about Peru, the problems it faces, the extraordinary resiliency of people living on the margins of society, and a whole lot about public health and international development.

Darren Y.
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

Darren worked with Semilla Nueva, a grassroots organization promoting sustainable agriculture practices with small-scale rural farmers in Guatemala.

Semilla Nueva’s model fills the information gap by introducing novel methodologies to farmers and facilitating the participation, experimentation, and peer-to-peer exchange of successes, ideas, and education.

To see from the perspective of a small rural producer in Guatemala has changed my concept of agriculture. Like many consumers in the U.S., I was disconnected from my food. I ate with no concept of the harvest and natural cycle, only the finished product. A shrink wrapped styrofoam package of chicken did not represent something that had once been a living, clucking being, only 500 grams of immediate sustenance. Working with rural farmers has helped to open my eyes to the slow natural cycle of production that is essential to consumption.

Joanna K.
Aizawl, Mizoram, India

Joanna spent a life-changing year working with Global Health Access Program as an India Fellow providing technical assistance and capacity-building support for public health programs operating at the India-Burma border.

GHAP believes that access to health care is a basic human right, and the people living at the India-Burma border do not have access to adequate health care and therefore are denied a fundamental human right.

After this year, I feel even more certain of my chosen career path: to strengthen health programs for those who had to flee their homes due to disaster or fear of persecution. I plan to return to school to study public health and I hope to return to work abroad with displaced populations throughout my career. I know my experience with GHAP helped me grow as an individual and made me a more aware global citizen.

Jessica L.
Kigutu, Burundi

Jessica volunteered with Village Health Works, helping to make data more accessable at the clinic.

A summer volunteer started to build a database in Access before I got to the clinic. I arrived with a strong starting point in place. My first job was to make the system as simple and robust as possible. I monitored data quality carefully and made changes to reduce errors in data entry. I adapted the interface so that it would more closely resemble the paper patient forms that we use.

I created an instruction manual about data entry so that everyone would follow the same protocols, and I added new fields that could be coded in the system. After a couple months, when data quality was sufficiently high, we were able to switch over to using the Access database as a basis for reporting, rather than our patient registers. I wrote a program that would automatically compile information from the database into a single reporting document. Data that once took days to generate was now available with the click of a button.