The Center for Global Initiatives collaborated with the Flying Doctors of America in a pioneering and critical project. We were the first non-Bolivian group to be granted access to three Bolivian prisons. Hundreds of children live with their parent(s) in these prisons. We provided care with a focus on general medicine, pediatrics, and gynecology. The Center will embark on a journey to help these non-criminal, yet imprisoned children through a unique and pioneering effort. Basically, we plan (pending funding) to develop and deploy educational and social skills training for educators (there are schools in the prisons!) and guards, as well as parenting skills training and resilience development instruction

The kindergarten we helped to found in 2005 is expanding its scope via THRIVE. We are using education as a basis for developing resilience of the orphans as well as those providing healthcare in the neighboring clinic/hospital. We will be developing programs for local nursing students and orphan children in collaboration with local doctors, nurses, and staff. We will have a particular focus on counseling to people with HIV infection and AIDS. The ages of children are between 3 to 12 years. The name of the hospital is Huruma Designated Hospital and is in Kilimanjaro Region in Rombo District. The primary illnesses of patients in our hospital are Malaria, T.B, Pneumonia, Immunosupression, Diabetes, and Hypertension.

Proof of concept. We are developing a project that will bring training and potentially telehealth services to rural areas that is delivered by indigenous village women. Public heath, primary care, first aid, and emergency services are all but absent in rural areas of Cambodia. “Itinerant” medical ex-pats may be the currently best available healthcare resource in such areas. This project seeks to empower indigenous women by providing training in basic public health practices and emergency medical care/first aid so they may be of aid to those in their for their villages. They would be supported by a training program that will enable them to provide sufficient help until the patient can be taken to the nearest medical facility or a traveling physician can come to the village. It will be unique, as it will not require literacy to operate.

Contacts and relationships have been developed with colleagues in Benin that crosscuts various areas: health and illness, poverty and sustainability, environmental concerns, traditional and medical sciences/health treatment and education. We plan to develop a scientific and economic mechanism of researching the medicinal properties of specific plant materials used by our Benin partners (university scientists and traditional healers) to further develop medicines and use the resultant knowledge in order to refine the compounds to have fewer side-effects and improved dosing characteristics, and to develop that intellectual property into concomitant economic value that will provide for economic sustainability, self-sufficiency, and independence for on-going research.

Through collaboration with partners in rural India who have developed a comprehensive, community-based primary health care approach, we are helping to recruit students for summer experiences that will provide life changing perspective on healthcare. The project is called WorldWise and it is being made available only to graduate students (in any health discipline), med students, and Fellows