DGH Profile:
Dr. Vicente Gavidia
By Jonathan Harris
As Vicente Gavidia, MD, drives to his job in San Salvador each morning, he passes the buildings and streets he has known since he was a boy growing up in the city, aware that much has changed.

The 43 year-old project coordinator for UNICEF remembers a time when the surrounding forests spread into the city and the nearby volcano was blanketed with green. “It was a smaller city then,” he remembered during a winter visit to Atlanta for a DGH board meeting. “Now one third of all El Salvadorans live there.”

“We need doctors who can take care of diarrhea, not specialists.”
Some things, however, remain the same. Gavidia remembers feeling dissatisfied since adolescence with the state of the world and the terrible living conditions in which most of his fellow countrymen languished. His undergraduate education reinforced these sentiments by teaching him the socio-political reasons for the problems he deplored. Feeling that as a doctor he could make the most difference in the lives of those around him, Gavidia decided to study medicine.
Dr. Gavidia with a community member in Morazán. The t-shirt he is wearing was designed by Arthur Seiji Hayashi, a recent DGH student volunteer. It has been sold to MDS/DGH supporters around the world.
Then during most of the 1980s, Gavidia worked for the Ministry of Health in Nicaragua, where he learned how to best direct his career to the service of others through Community Medicine–working closely with the communities that needed him most. Upon his return to El Salvador, he worked with health promoters in the outskirts of the capital. Soon after, he joined PRODERE, the United Nations program for ex-refugees and others displaced by the war. As part of his work with PRODERE, Gavidia coordinated with many non-governmental health organizations, including MDM-El Salvador. In fact, PRODERE worked with Lanny Smith and the other MDM-El Salvador volunteers on projects such as building a clinic in El Tablón and funding the health promoters. When the PRODERE project ended in 1994, Gavidia and other Salvadoran professionals began to think about how to stop relying entirely on foreign funding. That is how Medicos Por El Derecho a La Salud (MDS) was first born. (MDS was DGH's partner organization in El Salvador between 1995 and 2004.)

Now, besides his full time job coordinating UNICEF’s health, nutrition and advocacy program in three departments of El Salvador, Gavidia works with MDS. He is presently the non-profit group’s vice-president and served as acting president while Dr. Maruca Figueroa was in England studying tropical medicine. He also serves on DGH’s Advisory Council.

“We have lawyers, doctors, psychologists, nutritionists, engineers and other professionals forming a core group of about 15 members,” he said of MDS volunteers. “We also have a small council of advisors,” including a former director of the national university.

MDS, in turn, inspired the formation of DGH, which now works to channel funds and volunteers to their joint projects. “We work together in the construction of clinics, working with the health promoters, and providing essential medicines: vitamins, antibiotics, and pain killers,” Gavidia explained. MDS is also promoting mental health in local schools and studying the factors that make it difficult for rural residents to obtain proper health care.

Unfortunately, finding the funding necessary to bring all these plans to fruition is a constant struggle. Matters could get even more difficult for the MDS community health care project as co-partner Médecins du Monde (MDM) contemplates pulling out of El Salvador for good. “The European Union might extend its support one more year, but then MDM might leave the country,” Gavidia said. Should MDM leave, MDS hopes to finance the continuing work themselves in partnership with DGH and other organizations. “We know the project well,” Gavidia said. “MDS is going to take responsibility for it, perhaps this year.”

Increasing the difficulty of the task is a law recently passed by the right-wing Arena Party that aims to keep a tighter rein on non-governmental organizations (NGOs). “The government wants to exert more control over the NGOs,” Gavidia explained. “They believe that NGOs are very close to the opposition. They think they can control the opposition better if they control the NGOs.”

MDS hopes to ensure a better future for all El Salvadorans, who are still threatened by a ready supply of weapons and violence, through education. Educating young people, especially students, about human rights is one of the group’s most ambitious goals. “We are going to prepare a human rights course and offer it at the University through the medical school,” Gavidia said. MDS would also like to involve community leaders in these classes. The goal is to generate increased interest in practical medicine, especially among Salvadoran medical students, encouraging them to work among the people who need basic health care the most. “I have many friends who are doctors but they only work with the middle class, not the poor,” Gavidia said.

Dr. Gavidia decided to become a doctor himself when a college classmate, who later became a guerrilla leader and was killed in the civil war, convinced him that the country was in desperate need of doctors to cure common ailments. “She told me: We need doctors who can take care of diarrhea, not specialists,” Gavidia remembers. Now he hopes to offer the same guidance to other students.



Current Activities Advocacy FAQ Newsletters Liberation Medicine Photo Album Getting Involved Donate Supplies Needed What's New Links Search the DGH Web Site


Search the DGH Web Site Now!

Legal Notice