Every Person Has a Right to Health
/0 Comments/in Guest Author /by Anielka MedinaMy mother, Azucena Escoto, lived a life typical of women in Nicaragua’s impoverished rural communities. Married and a mother at the age of 16, she became the sole provider for her young family of seven children when my father left us just ten years later.
The town I grew up in, Mina El Limon, is built around a gold mine. The people who own the mine are wealthy, but like most of the people in the village, my mother earned less than $1 a day. Determined to give her children a chance to rise above a life of poverty, Azucena looked for work outside of our village and took a job in the capital city of Managua. The city is a three-hour bus ride from Mina El Limon, so Azucena decided to leave us in the care of my grandma while she worked in the city. My mom returned home for a couple of days every month - proudly handing over her monthly salary of $160.
Even though I was just a baby when she left and my life in Mina El Limon was easier because of Azucena’s hard work - I never stopped missing her. I was always planning for the day she would be back for good, and my dreams were filled with all of the things we would do together – just like other girls. In late 2006, when I turned 16, my mom finally returned home. However, it was not the joyful reunion we expected. Azucena was stricken by sudden weight loss and severe pain. Too weak to continue working, she finally made her way to a hospital where she learned she had cervical cancer. According to the diagnosis, the cancer was advanced, and she would have about a year left to live.
Azucena, realizing her family depended on her for survival, convinced the doctor to admit her to the country’s one public hospital that treats women with cervical cancer. As I was going through high school, I experienced her suffering as she struggled through painful episodes of chemotherapy. Now my dreams revolved around miracle treatments that would make her healthy again. Azucena returned to work but continued to decline and eventually was fired from her job. She went back to the hospital for another diagnosis and found out cancer had invaded her colon and stomach. Despite the immense courage Azucena showed in the face of the disease, she lost her battle to cervical cancer and died at the young age of 48 - just weeks before I graduated from high school.
After watching her torturous battle and death from cervical cancer, I began to dream about finding a way to keep more children from losing their mothers to this horrible disease. I earned a scholarship to the university determined to learn everything I could about cervical cancer and in 2013 graduated with a degree in clinical bioanalysis focused on epidemiology. Cervical cancer is a slow-growing cancer caused by HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection. In the United States and other developed countries pre-cancerous cells are detected by PAP tests and easily treated. Death from cervical cancer is one of the greatest health inequities in the world - with 85% of deaths occurring in developing countries, which lack access to the most basic proactive health measures for women.
As I shared the knowledge that cervical cancer, a preventable disease, is the #1 cancer killer and a leading cause of death of women in Nicaragua, it was easy to enlist others to make this dream a reality. We launched The Lily Project in 2014, motivated by a simple belief: every person has a right to health. Named in honor of Azucena, Lily in English, we deploy a simple ‘screen and treat’ procedure endorsed by the WHO for low resource countries. The procedure is beautiful in its simplicity: a trained health technician swabs a women’s cervix with vinegar (acetic acid); infected cells, if any, become white, and cryotherapy is performed to freeze and destroy the abnormal tissue. Since the beginning of the year, we have worked in rural villages in Nicaragua, similar to where I grew up, screening over 600 women and providing life-saving treatment to 60 who had precancerous cells. Dreams have turned into plans and with the help of the Friends of Lily, by 2020 The Lily Project will prevent cervical cancer for more than 200,000 impoverished women living in rural villages throughout Central America.
Today we are in a capital-raising campaign to purchase trucks and equipment to outfit our version of a mobile health clinic. To learn more and donate to our campaign, please visit: http://www.thelilyproject.org/get-involved.html.
About the blogger:
Anielka is the founder of The Lily Project. Her experience growing up in rural Nicaragua serves as the foundation for the vision of the project. Beating all odds, Anielka was accepted to the Autonomous University of Nicaragua-Leon (UNAN), where she studied bioanalysis with a focus on cytology. During an internship with the foremost trainer in Nicaragua of VIA and cryotherapy, Dr. Sonia Cabeza, she was fully trained on the use of visualization and cryotherapy. Visualization and cryotherapy are the most effective tools for early detection and treatment of HPV, the leading cause of cervical cancer. Anielka is now responsible for the overall development of the strategy and delivery of the detection and treatment to the rural communities in Nicaragua.
Its Never Too Late
/0 Comments/in Guest Author /by R. Bruce LoganVietnam changed my life – Twice! The first time I was an infantry platoon leader immersed in one of the United States’ longest and ugliest wars. I lost my innocence. At 24-years old I learned violence and commanded violent men, who wrought brutality on people different from us. But at the time we thought that we were doing something noble because our country asked it of us.
The second time Vietnam changed my life I was in my 60s and had returned with my wife, Elaine Head, on a journey of reconciliation. I hoped to expunge my ghosts. And as I did. We discovered a Vietnam that was vastly different from the one I had known four decades earlier. We found peace and forgiveness, and overwhelmingly friendly and welcoming people in a beautiful, yet bewildering country. We found a culture of contradictions: Communist government and Capitalist economy, modern cities and dirt poor villages, cell phones and computers juxtaposed against hand-lifted rail crossing barriers.
We also found a country rife with social problems: poverty, disease, repression, corruption, a disproportionately high number of people with disability (PWD), male dominance, and child trafficking. But for me, two of the more compelling issues are legacies of the war.
- Thousands of people suffering from the lasting effects of Agent Orange, the herbicide sprayed on the countryside by U.S. forces. Those who are affected include people who were alive during the war, as well as many second and third generation victims who suffer horrendous birth defects and deformities.
- Rural areas vastly contaminated by unexploded ordnance left over from the war. As a result, hundreds of people, mostly children, are killed and maimed each year when they handle old bombs and artillery shells.
None of these scars are hidden in Vietnam, although sufferers of leprosy are still somewhat ghettoized. The stark realities that we encountered in remote villages and on city streets tore at our aging hearts. We had planned a placid retirement in our idyllic island community on Canada’s West Coast. Instead we threw ourselves headlong into volunteer work in Vietnam.
We discovered a social enterprize that specializes in helping PWD learn marketable skills as artisans and crafts persons and thus become integrated as productive members of society. We decided we wanted to help, but what could two people in their 60s with no experience in arts and crafts contribute? After all, most volunteers working for NGOs in Asia are young, zealous, idealistic and fresh out of university.
To our surprise, Binh (who is a wheel chair user himself) and his wife Quyen, the founders of Reaching Out, were enthusiastic about our business and management skills and welcomed us into their fold, encouraging us to come each year and stay for three months at a time.
We have now been traveling to and living in Vietnam every year for nine years. We have been making a difference despite, or maybe because of, our age and experience.
- Reaching Out Vietnam in the city of Hoi An, where we work as business advisors and customer service trainers, has grown from modest beginnings twelve years ago to 65 employees, all of them enjoying a standard of living they would not have thought possible before.
- The Hoi An chapter of VAVA (an Agent Orange victims’ assistance agency) has, at our behest and with funds we raise from other American veterans of the Vietnam War, initiated a micro-loan program which enables victims to create small business and become independent.
- Through our work with Children’s Education Foundation Vietnam, our fundraising efforts and organizational skills have helped more girls stay in school, thus reducing their vulnerability to trafficking.
So it’s never too late to begin in a small way to have an impact. If you want to know more about what we do, better yet, help us in our efforts, you can order a print version of our book, Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart. You can also order a Kindle version from Amazon.com. All proceeds will go toward helping the disenfranchised in Vietnam.
About the Blogger:
HELP: It sounds like a miracle, but it isn’t
/0 Comments/in Guest Author /by Conor BohanElice Oreste grew up in a remote, mountainous region of Haiti called Labiche. When he was born, Labiche had no roads, no utilities and no schools. Few in his community, including his parents, had ever been to school. Luckily for Elice, a local resident who had been educated, came back to the area and started a primary school. The first year, it had one room, the second year, two rooms, and so on. Elice’s mother said that since she had never spent a single day in school, when Elice started school she could only give him a pencil, a notebook and a prayer.
Elice lived with his parents and four siblings in a two room house; they got by on the revenues from his parents small plot of land but things were always tight in Labiche so people made do with what they had. Elice developed an early interest in music, and at the age of 12 he built his first guitar from scrap wood.
Luckily for Elice, just as he graduated at the top of his class in primary school, the government built the region’s first-ever secondary school in neighboring Grigri. However, it was a two hour walk from his house, each way. Elice did that walk every school day for five years and still finished high school with a straight-A average.
But university was out of the question. Not only had no one in Labiche ever been to university, Elice’s family could barely afford to pay for the seven hour bus ride to the capital, let alone books or housing or tuition. So he apprenticed himself to a local carpenter at a monthly salary of $50. Elice’s life was pretty much set. He would apprentice at the same salary until he was ready to go out on his own and maybe end up making $200 a month.
One day HELP (Haitian Education & Leadership Program) showed up at the high school in Gris Gris, offering university scholarships for straight-A students. The Principal said he didn’t have any that year but he told them about Elice who had just graduated the year prior, and we left an application. Thankfully, Elice got the application and that September he began an industrial engineering degree at Haiti’s oldest private university. At school he was consistently on the Dean’s List and when he graduated in 2014, he secured a summer internship with an energy company in Green Bay, Wisconsin. On his return to Haiti Elice found a job as junior maintenance engineer at the local Heineken brewery at a starting salary of $18,000 a year – 30 times what he had made as an apprentice.
Despite his success, Elice remains attached to his humble roots and committed to improving his hometown. He returns often to Labiche where he has transformed a musical group he started with some friends into a educational and charitable group which awards prizes for the top local students and distributes food to the most needy, who Elice describes as “those that haven’t eaten in two or three days.”
When Elice talks about his story he says, “It sounds like a miracle, but it isn’t. It’s real. And we are only just beginning. We are going to change Labiche, and we are going to change Haiti.”
We are losing more than 30 scholarships from institutional funders this year. Despite a record 291 straight-A applicants, we can only admit 20 freshmen next month, our smallest class in five years. It will also be the first time in HELP’s history that student enrollment will shrink from one year to the next. With 160 students, HELP is still strong but we would like to be stronger to provide opportunity to an increasing number of students.
Help make a difference by donating and sharing this blog with your friends and family!
About the Blogger:
Conor Bohan, HELP Founder & Executive Director, lived and worked in Haiti from 1996 to 2008. Under his leadership, HELP has grown from a single student to the largest university scholarship program in Haiti. In addition to growing HELP, he was a volunteer teacher, Deputy Director of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Haiti, and Director of Haiti Programs for the American Institutes for Research (AIR). Conor has a B.A. in History from Brown University and was named one of the Hemisphere’s Innovators by Americas Quarterly Magazine and is a recent Ashoka Fellow.