GlobeMed at Brown: Fall 2012 Info Sessions!

Open Heart Film

Check out the official trailer of "Open Heart," an upcoming docu-short--a crazy story about eight Rwandan children receiving the lifesaving heart surgeries that millions in Africa need...

(P.S. some of us actually helped work on this!)

For more info, check out www.openheartfilm.com

GlobeMed at Community Day!

As Commencement drew near at Brown, Providence was in a glorious bout of summer weather. Some GlobeMed members and new friends participated in Brown's Community Day on May 20th, 2012, an event that was part of Senior Week at Brown. Local kids from Providence interacted with various Brown and Providence organizations to learn new things - from dance moves to facts about butterflies - and enjoy the day. The GlobeMed at Brown members who were still on campus brought paper and colored markers, while our new young friends brought their ideas and creativity.

Global Health U Coordinator Anna Makaretz smiles up from her creation-in-progress - a collection of colorful fruits and vegetables, no doubt connected to her expertise from her other secret identity: Vegetable Fairy! By the end of the day, the girls were experts in drawing lemon slices and strawberries too.

If you look closely at Anna's paper, you can see an awesome green leafy vegetable! Two sisters join in the fun and make their own pieces of art.

Changemakers-to-be pose with their creations!

The graduating seniors of GlobeMed 2011-2012: Ashlie Williams - GROW Coordinator (left), and Alina Kung - Internal President (right)... plus a new GlobeMed friend, Sarah (middle)!

It's been wonderful learning and growing with everyone this year. Have a great summer everyone!

GlobeMed Global Health Summit 2012: Walking Together, Walking Far--Partnership as a Framework for Meaningful Action

"If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together." --African proverb

I've always been a fast walker. The way I've always seen it, the faster you walk, the faster you get from point A to point B, because what mattered was not the distance but your destination. But Summit...Summit couldn't have shown me more how wrong I was in my thinking, as nice and pretty my intentions were.

To be honest, I was a little lost and crazy before all of this. I came to Brown a chalk-full optimistic first-year (let's just stick "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed" in there), searching desperately for the people and the groups and the courses that would give me a chance to mold myself into someone I actually wanted to be. Let me just say that being aware of global health disparities was not exactly on my list. It was too broad. Too much. Between the impoverished and the comfortable I knew I'd have to walk worlds before I could effect change. And then there was GlobeMed, and after the intriguing yet ever-confusing info sesh I attended near the start of the fall semester (Models? Framework? Flowcharts?) I decided there was something more to this movement for health equity than just what I could do and how many shoes I would run down.

Small groups 11 & 12 at our final discussion!

Partnership--if we are greater than the sum of our parts, then there's definitely something about the GlobeMed network that speaks to humanity. I think that was one of the most prominent lessons I learned at Summit. From Melissa Covelli's opening keynote on eradicating the 1% (of polio cases, excuse me) to the three intense workshops I attended on FACEAIDS, PIH, "big pharms" and pharm labs, the overarching model of their partnerships with those struggling took, roughly, the form of "asking what they need." GlobeMed isn't just another non-profit whose mission is to dump tons of food or medical supplies in a needy community and calling it a good day's work. It's a network of students looking to start a conversation with other people around the world, to learn about differences in an attempt to foster global health equity--because we believe everyone deserves access to healthcare and the right to a healthy life. I know word choice changes how we see things and I know I'm biased; and it's not to say that quick goodwill trips don't do any good. But all of these presentations, including other colleges' globalhealthU track 3 talks, really overturned how I thought about my own aspirations. Getting from point A to point B wasn't the point at all. Sure, raising money and sending that money to U-Tena is one of our biggest goals at our Brown chapter, but the conversation doesn't stop once that money is transferred. There's accountability, constant updates, and GROW--always, always more to do before we reach our next goal, and the way we get there is what truly sets the course for helping others help themselves. And making friendships! Not as the typical white-supremacist, "this is what we're going to give you and this is what you should do with it," but friends, partners, forming a global community.

Selling Kenyan bone jewelry :)

Speaking of friends...Hwajin and I made so many at the conference! There were hoards and hoards of other students so actively involved and in love with the GlobeMed mission, and it was so stimulating to not just get to know them as people, but brainstorm ideas to better our chapters, find common ground on issues, and even start pretty heated debates on morality and the like. Personally, I found it so amazing, how the first thing I could talk about with someone within five minutes of meeting them was the marriage of conventional hospital births with the comfort of homes in an effort to celebrate birth, as a human right, even in those countries without proper sanitary facilities.

Oh, UT-Austin adopted us...

Obviously, it's near impossible to bring the entire Summit experience back to Brown. But in three short days, I've taken more notes than I have all semester long for my Gender Studies seminar, written down more quotes than I imagined, smiled more about the world and the direction we're headed, and loved more our efforts to be a constant of change. As Jonathan Smith so curiously put it, we need to change how we see global health inequity, and change this epidemic of disease into an epidemic of emotion. I believe that GlobeMed at Brown provides a collective step towards this movement, and along with the other 49 chapters, 1,500 students, 21 countries, and countless partnerships among them, I think with hands shaped like hearts, our footfalls will take us to a place that cannot be summed by any point in the alphabet.

I am so excited to see what the next school year will hold for us :)

--Elaine Hsiang

A big question: How do we reconcile targeted interventions with a belief in holistic health?

Abroad Reflections: Intersections in Health

Taking leave of the oppressive sun, I head inside the home of my host mother, Gloria, who has the television turned on to a sermon being held outdoors elsewhere in South Africa. Gloria lives in a modest, yet comfortable house in the older part of Zwelethemba, an apartheid-era black township in Worcester. She is a family matriarch, perhaps in her 70's, with two daughters and a son, from whom she has become a granny and great-granny. I tell her I have visited a sangoma—a traditional Nguni healer that specializes in medicinal herbs and ritual communing with the spirit world. Gloria asks me what the sangoma said and I recount the story of the traditional healer’s calling: wracked with terrible visions and pain, the woman had been compelled by ancestral spirits to join her profession. Gloria asks me if I believe in such things, but before I can respond, answers her own question in the affirmative because I "don't know about it." We turn our attention back to the television, which cuts to a woman publicly confessing her (extensive) sins. Gloria tells me, assuredly, that the woman is a sangoma. She tells me that, as a Christian, she doesn’t believe in sangomas, only Jesus.


As if to illustrate, Gloria shares a story of when her boy, at age 6, developed a brain tumor. To treat this tumor, the doctors told her that a surgery was needed, surgery that could only be performed in the distant city of Cape Town. Once there, Gloria realized that she should have had her pastor at church lay on hands. So, she asked the doctors in Cape Town to delay the surgery, then travelled home by train several hours and went to her pastor in his church. He knew why they had come without her telling and did lay on hands. When she returned to Cape Town, she prayed, the doctors took another x-ray and the boy's tumor was gone. Gloria attributes his healing to her prayer and to her faith: "I believe in doctors, I'm not saying that I don't, but mostly I believe in Jesus Christ and prayer."


This account, one of many personal stories I heard during my stay in the township, only serves as an introduction to the entangled traditional, post- and neo-colonial influences in Zwelethemba. A sociologist might approach this interaction using the lens of ‘intersectionality,’ the multiple facets of a person’s identity that mediate oppression. I am not a sociologist, but one thing I learned abroad is that any individual's beliefs are produced by their relationships and interactions with other people, or as a mentor put it, their "web of witnesses." It was precisely these that the South African apartheid regime sought to control. The physical separation of the township from Worcester by a DMZ-like barren expanse constantly reminded me of this. We often hold our beliefs without context, as unquestioned habits divorced from the people and structures that influenced them. In particular, one might miss the oppression or privilege wrapped up within one's worldview. Open-minded recognition is the first step to emancipation.


Connor Barnhart
Real names withheld.

Teaching the Little Kiddies to Be Healthy!

A group of us from GlobeMed recently partnered with CHAP to teach 4-6 year olds at Mt. Hope Daycare how to eat healthy and stay active.  We created and performed a skit where Connor is looking for a snack.  The rest of the group came dressed and excited to help him choose what would keep him most energized and healthy.  A battle of sorts ensued between evil junkfood and healthy fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.  The candy, chips, and cookies didn't stand a chance.  By the end of the skit, the kiddies were yelling for apples, carrots, and broccoli.  Nice job team!  Go GlobeMed!

 Ready for our all-star performance...

 GlobeMed staff and CHAP members

Playful Penny, Fruit Fairy, Water Warrior, and Vegetable Fairy= Team Healthy!

Katrina Machado, Brown 2015

Social Stigma of HIV/AIDS in Kenya

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctWTZUCqGIk

Here's a link to a youtube video that was filmed by representatives of Smart Global Health, who "traveled to Kenya and met with community-based health programs working in areas ranging from Maternal Health, HIV, AIDS, Malaria, TB, and Infant Mortality."

I find this video particularly relevant to our current GlobeMed agenda. Over the past two weeks, we've spent a lot of time discussing what we know about HIV/AIDS and how we want to expand our understanding of the disease. Something that we've all expressed interest in learning more about is how HIV/AIDS is viewed in Kenyan society and what kind of stigma it carries.

This video sheds some light on that question. Native community-health volunteers explain that HIV/AIDS is not something talked about lightly, or even at all. People are afraid to be publicly identified as victims of the disease, and will avoid health clinics so as not to draw attention to their condition.

Without open acknowledgment of infection, Kenyans affected by HIV/AIDS won't care for themselves properly and won't warn their sexual partners about transmission. At our next meeting, I hope that we can discuss ways to combat the social stigma that keeps HIV/AIDS victims silent.

Marissa Bych
Brown University Class of 2015