Don't miss this special event coming up at Vanderbilt on Friday, November 21.

Yi He

The Frist Global Health Leaders (FGHL) program affords young health professional students, residents, and fellows the opportunity to serve and train abroad in underserved communities for up to one semester. In doing so, they will bolster capacity in clinics in need of support as well as offer training to community health workers to promote sustainability upon their departure from these communities. As part of the program, they blog about their expereinces here. For more information, visit our program page. 

Not too many things happened during this time period, I continued reading literature regarding baseline survey of early child development in developing countries, talked with people in the community, identify key issue which I need to add into the survey; attended monthly hub meetings, tried to understand their responsibilities for supporting our core mission: promoting overall health status of vulnerable children in Munsieville.

I went into several child care centers in shack area with Betty, to observe how they take care of young kids. There is an ongoing research project in Thoughtful Path. Similar to a typical case-control study, they select teachers from some child care centers, provide them professional training and materials (case group), in the meantime, only consulate were provided to teachers in other child care centers (control group). So we go into these centers, observe teacher’s, children’s action, document them and see if kids from case group have better performance in daily life and in school. I believe kids from case group will have much better performance for sure. Flyers, posters and books are everywhere, teachers always remind children to behave healthy, and use puzzle game for brain development. However, in  control groups, untrained teachers in these centers basically do nothing but just feed kids breakfast and lunch, children were playing on their own, and teachers (or you can say housewives) just watch TV or do their own stuff. It is really sad seeing these, as an international charity organization, we dedicated to do our best providing best service to promote local people, but for evaluation purpose, we can’t fully help some of them. This makes me feel so bad and heartbroken.

One of the critical issues in shack area is fire. Paul told me that every week there is a shack burnt down, although we are focusing on early childhood development, we can’t just see people suffering and do nothing. So, in a weekend, collaborating with a Baptist church from Randfontein (a city near Munviesille), we brought many food and living essentials to families whose house have recently been burnt down, and build new home for them. I am not good at constructing, but was doing my part: painting and help moving stuff from here to there.  

Always feel good for helping people.   

Jennifer Eaton Dyer

Eating lunch outside the refectory of Vanderbilt Divinity School, back around the turn of the millennium, I remember stumbling across the stone etching of Schola Prophetarum, the School of the Prophets. I am sure all who have passed through the halls of the Divinity School may have reflected on their potential role as a prophet in our community, society, and our world. That is our legacy.

I had the unique opportunity during my time at Vanderbilt to work with a prophet-like figure, Bono, the co-founder of the ONE Campaign and the lead singer of the band U2. As he was traipsing across Middle America in 2002 during the Bush administration, galvanizing faith communities with his organization, DATA, I raised my hand to help. I spent the next six years with a brilliant rag-tag team of activists in Washington, DC. working together to promote awareness and advocacy for extreme poverty and disease, namely for HIV/AIDS in Africa. I served as the national faith outreach director. In 2002, less than 50,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa had access to anti-retroviral medication (ARVs) that could save their lives from HIV/AIDS. Today, more than 12.9 million people have access to ARVs, thanks to the legislation of PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. More specifically, thanks to the American taxpayers. We have turned the tide.

Bono took a unique approach then by reaching out and pleading that faith communities take the lead on this issue of HIV/AIDS, in spite of the issue being at the heart of the culture wars of the 1980s. He stood outside the walls of the Church as an Irish rock star, but his language and zeal and authentic Christian beliefs allowed him to serve as prophet-esque leader inspiring faith leaders and people in the pews to love our neighbors, albeit an ocean away. And I had the unique opportunity to strategize, implement, and create language for him and the organization that I hope offered a prophetic voice on behalf of some of the most vulnerable populations around the world.

Today, that opportunity to create new language and a fresh perspective for a prophetic voice in the global health arena has arisen again.

Family planning, like HIV/AIDS has found itself in the throes of cultural battles. It is often misunderstood as including abortion, which even today, 40 percent of Americans believe it should be illegal in all or most cases.[1]But planning families doesn’t have to mean abortion. In fact, it makes abortions less likely. When discussing family planning in the developing world, we discuss with the public that the Helms Amendment of 1973 prohibits the use of US foreign assistance to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortion.

Jennifer Dyer speaking with Senator Bill Frist

I now serve as executive director of Senator Bill Frist, MD’s Nashville-based global health organization, Hope Through Healing Hands. Recently, we have partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build the Faith-based Coalition for Healthy Mothers and Children Worldwide to promote awareness and advocacy for maternal, newborn, and child health with a special emphasis on healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies, or family planning in developing nations. 220 million women around the world say they want to avoid their next pregnancy but they don’t have the education, services, or access to contraceptives to do so. Melinda has made this a priority for her and for her Foundation.  As have we.

Senator Frist and I have been traveling across the United States once again, not unlike what we did over a decade ago for HIV/AIDS, to talk about family planning with faith leaders in churches, nonprofits, and academic communities. We also have been talking with religious and cultural leaders including artists, authors, and athletes. And we are building endorsements for the coalition with momentum.

Our goal is to create a new, more meaningful language to talk about the importance of family planning. Right now, to create a “big tent” approach welcoming Catholics and conservatives alike, we use language like “healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies.” These issues are at the nexus of other global health challenges, including combating extreme poverty, keeping children in schools, promoting gender equality, improving maternal and child health, and preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS. We can all agree that healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies saves lives.

If a woman can better time her pregnancy in a developing nation, between the ages of 18-34, her rate of surviving the complications of pregnancy and childbirth rises dramatically. For instance, she is 10-14 times more likely to survive childbirth between the ages of 20-24. And if she can space those children, just three years apart, the child is twice as likely to survive the first year of life.

Senator Frist and I do not stand inside the church as leaders of faith. But we have longstanding relationships and the expertise to challenge many in the faith community to rethink its stance on family planning, particularly for those in the developing world. We may not have the rock star status of Bono, but the education from the School of the Prophets still infuses my own writing as we create strategy and language for a renewed dialogue across the spectrum of faith communities. We hope to proffer a prophetic voice with a clarion call to save the lives of millions.

We invite you to join us. Learn more at HopeThroughHealingHands.org.