The health care industry in the USA is one of the most lucrative, in-demand career fields one could enter; so much so that many doctors and nurses from the developing world leave their home countries seeking work in the US or other places where higher wages can be found.
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A story of community and maternal and child health in remote Senegal thanks to ChildFund / USAID.
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“You need a medium to tell people. When I show pictures and video, a client understands the information so much better. Mere verbal information does not have credibility and authority.” These words are not lifted from one of my recent sales pitches to potential clients. Rather, they were said by a community health worker named Sunita in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. Sunita now uses a phone app to facilitate her work from house to house among pregnant and nursing women. Uttar Pradesh currently has some of the worst maternal and newborn mortality rates in all of India. When the government launched their ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) program in 2005, the goal was to place one such community health worker in every village in the country in order to reduce maternal and newborn deaths associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Today, with nearly 900,000 ASHAs, India has more[…]
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The dawn of the new millennium cast a dark pall over the Southern African nation of Malawi. The county faced a food crisis that was, in part, fueled by the loss of agricultural workforce due to AIDS-related deaths. The national HIV prevalence rate was at 16%, and as high as 30% among pregnant women. With the coming of anti-retroviral medication (ARVs) in 2003, NGOs and systems of government rushed to educate HIV positive people, who had by now organized into peer support groups within their communities. Essential steps taken by these groups to living positively with the disease included good nutrition, practicing abstinence and safe sex, proper ARV adherence, as well as learning how to give home-based care to bed-ridden HIV positive peers in the community. Ten years later, support group members are not only some of the healthiest-looking people in their communities, they’re also talking to their negative or[…]
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We’ve reached a global hinge point in the treatment of HIV. People living with the disease are no longer passive beneficiaries. After more than a decade of receiving health and nutrition training, HIV+ people are often times living healthier lifestyles than many of their negative peers. Catholic Relief Services‘ Expert Client program places trained HIV+ community members in local health facilities where they guide new patients through the rigors of anti-retroviral treatment (ARV). By using their own experience of living with the disease to counsel and mentor, they empower the new patients to live more healthy and productive lives. I recently shot and produced this video for CRS in southern Malawi. The program is funded by USAID.
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Pathfinder International’s mobile health care camps bring family planning services, HIV testing, ante-natal care, and immunizations to isolated communities that otherwise would not have access to health services. The following were taken on a rainy day in Kyanjojo and Kasese, in Western Uganda. “The hospital is very far and there are no midwives to attend to them in case a woman goes into labor at night… We are losing very many mothers. You never know which pregnancy will not be proper or which pregnancy will lead to death,” says midwife Harriet Kegonzi, shown above. Pathfinder also emphasizes contraception as a principal method of bringing down high maternal mortality rates. With more than six children per mother on average, Uganda consistently ranks among the highest fertility rates in the world.
Read MoreI endured photographing in Dar es Salaam’s grueling heat yesterday morning, but it’s nothing compared to what some of these women have gone though. Yes, women get breast cancer in Africa, too. But here the dynamic is different. With limited health care facilities and awareness, most women who have breast cancer are unaware of it and end up succumbing to the disease. Susan G. Komen for the Cure is working to change that. Known for their Walk for the Cure as well as other advocacy and research programs, their scope has gone global in recent years and is now reaching women in Sub-Saharan Africa. Women diagnosed with breast cancer in Tanzania and other African countries have to deal with severe stigma and the temptation to consult traditional healers, as their family or peers may advise. It’s a miracle that about one hundred survivors came out yesterday, donning the pink shirt[…]
Read MoreIt’s been ten years since world leaders came together to form what became the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to tackle world poverty. Heads of state recently met again for a summit at UN headquarters in New York to discuss progress made in the last decade. My most recent assignment with Water Aid UK was not to document progress that the NGO has made in communities where it works. Instead I was commissioned to visit areas where there is still much work left to be done. Unfortunately, it’s not too hard to find schools, hospitals and communities that lack clean water sources or proper toilets and sanitation facilities here in NE Uganda, which is the poorest and least developed area of the country. Water Aid has used these stories for awareness campaigns that led up to the summit. They’ve also shared them with the decision makers themselves. They hope to[…]
Read MoreTwo weeks ago, Grace seemed like any other nine year old girl in northeastern Uganda’s Amuria District. She was attending school and helping her mother around the house. Suddenly she was unable to hold down food. The medicine her mother bought at the local clinic was of no help. Now Grace hasn’t eaten in over two weeks and weighs just 13 kilos (28 pounds). Sores on her lips and mouth make any ingestion of food far too painful to bear. Grace’s mother, Sarah Kembi (27), found out that her daughter was HIV positive only two years ago. Since that time Grace has been taking Septrin, a stabilizer drug that, while not an ARV, still reduces the chances of opportunistic infections. Sarah’s husband, Grace’s father, succumbed to AIDS around the same time Mrs. Kembi figured she had better get her daughter tested. Though Grace was likely healthy enough to forgo ARV[…]
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