By Lanny Smith, MD, MPH |
April 7, 2000 — Back in El Salvador for a brief time and what am I doing? Writing with my right hand while giving blood with my left arm, here at the social security hospital in San Salvador. One of our friends has just had open heart surgery and needs twenty more units! I invite anyone reading this letter to give a unit this week in our friend’s honor, no matter where you are. It is a great privilege—a form of Liberation Medicine. As I told our intubated but very alert Salvadoran friend, I prefer to give my blood for his country unit by unit, rather than all at once as so many of our other friends were forced to do. We are very lucky, indeed.
April 25, 2000 — Now I am back in Boston after the brief trip to El Salvador, which was sandwiched between an official Harvard School of Public Health student and faculty visit to Cuba and another school-based investigation of a 1996 flood in a "favela" (slum) of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This flood killed over fifty people, displaced thousands more for over a year, and yet was never internationally reported because it happened just prior to Carnival (startled tourists mean less cash). Many of the families who lost their homes were relocated to new one-room structures built on a thin layer of soil that was laid over an industrial waste dump. Tubes leading from the waste to the air just above head-level allow fumes to escape. Sometimes the municipality throws a match in the tubes to provide a combination of torch-light and toxic smoke. "My boy went into a coma for five days and was in the hospital for eight, after breathing that smoke," said one flood survivor. Why must people live like this in this very rich world? What can we do about it? I hope these are neither idle nor rhetorical questions. I want practical ideas for concrete action. Maybe I want too much, but I am betting you want that much too.
| “Thank you to all of you who have made our work possible so far. We need your active participation to continue molding who and what we are. Visit our web site and give us your suggestions. Better yet, come to the DGH fifth anniversary celebration and reflection at our annual General Assembly.” |
In Chiapas, DGH continues to work on both the preventive (through Health Promoters and local physicians) and curative (through hospital-based Volunteers) aspects of Health and Human Rights. A constant stream of Volunteers assist there.
New work is being done in Nicaragua with the orphanage-school "Los Chavalitos," in coordination with the non-profit group Friends of Los Chavalitos in New York. DGH Volunteers are scheduled to work in the orphanage the month of May.
And, among other places in the world, DGH continues with educational initiatives in the US, contributing toward the Physicians for Human Rights and Harvard International Student Association for Health and Human Rights Conference, "Breaking the Chains, Building the Links," which was held in March. DGH Volunteers have been giving numerous conference presentations on Liberation Medicine: from the American Medical Student Association national conference in Washington, DC, to the Hippocratic Society of MIT/Harvard, to the P. Catholic University in Brazil, to the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta (see page 4). DGH is also sponsoring a photography contest emphasizing Health and Human Rights, as a follow-up to last year’s enthusiastically received poetry contest.
DGH has begun to receive even more worthy invitations by communities around the world to accompany them through education and other concrete projects. We need your financial help to do this, so please give what you are able. And a warm thank you to all of you who have made our work possible so far. We also need your active participation to continue molding who and what we are. Please visit the web site at www.dghonline.org and give us your suggestions. Even better, come to the DGH fifth anniversary celebration and reflection at our annual General Assembly in Atlanta, August 11—13. We want to work with other groups who have similar goals, so if you are part of one let’s see how we can learn from, and work with, each other to promote social justice.
Drawing upon Health, Human Rights, Education and Art, let us build with the synergy that comes at the intersection of these currents. "As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich," said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. That is the way the world is made." At DGH we recognize this interdependence and wish to celebrate it through accompaniment and concrete community action. We have mentors and every-day heroes. Through their lives and example we know it’s not going to be easy. But, can we do anything else, given the way of the world and recognizing our own good luck within it?
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