It begins

This is a long post as it is the first....

On August 15, 2006, I was accepted into CFHI's Amazon Community Medicine Program.

CFHI stands for Child Family Health International. They provide students with service-learning opportunities in healthcare fields throughout the world. Their programs are in India, Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, and South Africa. You can see CFHI for yourself at www.cfhi.org, and click on the Amazon Community Medicine Program if you want to know more about their description of the program.

I met people at CFHI while working for VIDA, Volunteers for Inter-american Development Assistance, for the past year. VIDA is in Emeryville, CA, at the end of the Bay Bridge across from San Francisco. The website is www.vidausa.org and is available in English and cruddy Spanish. (Our partner is at www.vidaperu.org if you speak Spanish. Their site is pretty good.) What VIDA does is collect medical supplies from Bay Area hospitals, like Stanford, that they are going to throw away. Sometimes, because Stanford has so much money from their big endowments, they will just throw away perfectly good hospital beds that somebody else could use for years! VIDA rescues this stuff. We only take good, unexpired stuff because we don't believe in sending our garbage to the Third World just to get it out of the US and make ourselves feel good. We are only helping if we send quality donations, not if we send trash... that offends people. People living in poverty still have dignity and pride like everyone else.

CFHI works with VIDA sometimes. CFHI sends pre-medical and medical students and others interested in healthcare on month-long programs in other countries. This is NOT actually a medical mission. See, in a medical mission the idea is that you provide care to people so poor they don't have any other choice. This has actually hurt people in the past, because unqualified younger students from the US or Europe would go to developing countries to "practise" on people who had no choice but accept sub-standard care.

The problem is because many people still do not trust "Western" medicine. For example, they may rely on what we call shamans ("curanderos" in Spanish) to treat their illnesses. If they take their child to a Western medicine doctor or student who is not really qualified, and their child does not get better, they may never trust Western care again. So it is very important that only well-qualified doctors trained in cultural issues attempt what we think of as "medical missions."

So what am I doing then? I am assisting and observing healthcare providers in the field. This is more like a cultural exchange or opportunity.

CFHI works with VIDA because sometimes they send medical supplies with students, and VIDA can provide them with supplies. Well, since my job at VIDA is ending, I thought I'd give it a shot and see if CFHI would grant me one of their scholarships. They did, and now I am going to spend October in the program, and then I will contine traveling Ecuador through November.