Editor’s Note: Acumen Fund & LifeSpring Hospitals were recently featured as part of ABC’s spotlight on global health. In conjunction with this, SaveOne.net held an essay contest for people to explain why global health matters to them, awarding participants copies of The Blue Sweater.
Global health inequity is often dismissed as a luxury concern: one that’s too foreign, too daunting, and too detached to merit attention in an age when our own wallets are feeling the pinch.
We feel differently: we believe that a person’s right to a full and healthy life has nothing to do with where that person lives, and that for every health challenge, there’s an impassioned innovator–and often thousands of them–delivering hope to places that too often lack it. So a few weeks ago, we asked the SaveOne community why global health matters to them.
We received an overwhelming response from people all over the country, who refuse to sit idly by as millions of people around the world die unnecessarily. We heard from people like:
• Susan Samreth, of Chicago, who–following a trip to the slums in her parents’ homeland of Cambodia–chose to devote her life to engineering effective low-cost innovations for the developing world;
• Cherie Rudesill, whose Dodgeville, WI community raised over $50,000 with the help of 1100 volunteers and ensured that 700 kids had enough food for a year, and;
• Robert Toth, of Cleveland, OH, whose own great-grandmother lost four children before the age of two. To him, the “one life you save” could be the one that saves millions more.
With the help of the Acumen Fund, each person who submitted an essay will receive a free copy of Jacqueline Novogratz’s The Blue Sweater. Here are our top 5 winning essays:
Why global health matters to Franz Gastler — Edina, MN
When I moved to a tiny tribal village in eastern India in 2008, I met thirteen-year-old Sita, whose story, as it unfolded over the next two years, left me in awe. I hadn’t understood, until then, how inseparable health is from everything else, and just how commanding an issue health is for a girl in most parts of the world.
The second of five daughters, Sita was about to be married. Her parents, local purveyors of haria (rice beer), married off her older sister Gita at age fifteen just before the monsoon of 2009. Over their earthen pots of haria, several customers had been sizing up Sita for their own sons. Sita’s marriage was imminent. What else, her parents wondered, could you do with a girl.
When a girl like Sita is born in a village in Jharkhand, in eastern India, her life has usually already been planned out for her. She is isolated—if she is not seen working, she is harassed. She is illiterate—more than six in ten women here can’t read. She is married off—Jharkhand leads Indian states in child marriages. She gets pregnant. The cycle continues.
Since her sister’s marriage, Sita has seized upon a series of opportunities to launch herself out of this cycle, and has shown a hunger and desire to learn and excel that is stunning. It began the day her twelve-year-old neighbor Suman, asked if she would join her football team.
She became a regular student and began paying attention to her own health and to the health of her teammates. She even started coaching new girls when they came to the village field.
Two monsoons later, Sita is healthy and unmarried. Now juggling a football one-hundred-forty times, she was selected for the first ever training for girls at India’s premier football academy, Tata Football Academy (TFA).
“I feel happy,” she says. “My mother’s behavior is changing. She used to always think about me doing housework.”
Why global health matters to Monsumi Elvin
We are all connected. I think that as individuals, once we grasp the concept of being connected with one another, friends, neighbors, family, children and complete strangers and embrace them, the world becomes a much smaller place. We identify with one another, the plight of others. Their joy becomes our joy, their sadness becomes ours. Their welfare is our welfare.
Having had the opportunity to live and travel in both developed and developing countries, my eyes remain open to the many blessings around us. To live in a country (USA) where health care is considered a right by many, is a constant reminder to me of those who have to struggle globally for access to it. Once we realise that every individual on this planet plays a role in global healthcare, we can begin to change it. Each of us, whether we provide the care, finance the care, support the care, administer the care, or even care enough in general, can begin a chain of events to help those in need. This can be as simple as neighborhood fundraisers, school fundraisers, charitable giving or the gift of time to meet the needs of organizations providing the healthcare.
My six year old summed it up best by saying “Giving makes me feel good” and my ten year old added “I’m glad we helped that baby stay warm”. I am glad that my children are learning to connect, relate and give to others. But most importantly I am proud that on some level they are learning to empathise and connect with complete strangers who need their help. Global health will become a right, and not a priviledge if we can each step-up, and connect with one another.
Why global health matters to Patrick Furlong – Los Angeles, CA
You have no right to fail. I’m standing in a trash dump doubling as a squatter community on the outskirts of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Flies are buzzing around my face, and the unforgettable smell of a home cooked meal seeks to overcome the unmistakable stench of excrement and built up trash. Children, barefoot, run and splash through this puddle and that, kicking up dirty mosquito infested water.
And at some point I lost it. Days of this tour through the poverty that exists in this part of Ecuador get to me and I break down. And as I am awash in my tears, a woman named Pat who has spent her whole life fighting this inexcusable poverty, gently embraces me, wipes my tear, and simply tells me: you have no right to fail.
I moved to Latin America one year later. I spent over two years fighting to understand myself, struggling to understand the causes and the symptoms of the poverty that transformed from college text book statistics to post graduate reality: numbers who became friends and loved ones.
And so I care about global health because I see it as an exciting possibility to improve the lives of the people I came to love and those who face similar situations. I care about global health because if a community is healthy, they are more able to learn. If they learn, they are more likely to escape poverty. We must be willing to admit that solutions are possible. And when we admit this, we must dare to ask why countless untold stories of suffering continue to dwell in the shadows. It’s on me, it’s on you, it’s on everyone.
Why global health matters to Jack Hidary – New York, NY
The incredible disparity of health across the world is a symptom of deeper issues. We will not have healthier nations if we cannot deliver clean water, provide adequate housing and tap clean energy and transportation. You can drop in tons of medicine, but none will have any lasting effect without addressing these and other underlying problems.
As an individual who spent time doing medical research, I saw firsthand the complex system that is the body and mind. We cannot hope to attack disease with drug after drug. This is a losing battle. We must work to create an environment for health.
We know how to provide clean water and clean energy. Yet, we continue to repeat mistakes such as providing temporary housing in refugee, disaster and other areas in tent cities. We know that this will lead to cholera, lack of physical security and other issues. We have the technology now to provide access to locally built houses powered by the sun with clean water.
We know that local sources of grain and nutrition are important for health, yet we continue to drop ship corn, wheat and other grains to stricken areas without building any local agricultural infrastructure. These shipments kill off the local farmers and their productive capacity. In Afghanistan, for example, foreign programs have catalyzed more growth of poppy in place of wheat when we should be doing the reverse.
Health cannot be bought with expensive medicines. We will only achieve global health when we provide the fundamental platforms for a healthy society.
I would like to live in a world where we can see health statistics rise dramatically in the next ten years, not in generations. I would like to live in a world where we can connect directly with people across the globe over the net and find that they have the same access to the core sources of healthy living that we enjoy in the United States.
Why global health matters to Corey Seeman – Saline, MI
As a child, I was mesmerized by the parable of the Mustard Seed. In that story, a despondent mother attempted to bring a dead child back to life. A wise man said he could do that, but she would need to produce a mustard seed from someone who never known death. She quickly realized that it was not possible, teaching us that we all must know death. But I always wondered if people would suffer as much where access to healthcare was a right, not a privilege. Both in the United States and globally, access to the health care system is elusive. Global healthcare providers often struggle with ways to expand capacity to ensure that more people have access to life-saving and life-improving procedures. If we can all help in any way, we can collectively make the world that better place we all want it to be. My way is through information.
As a librarian at the Ross School of Business of the University of Michigan, I am able to work with many students who are looking at this very question. In many regards, helping these providers find the key information they need can be the real keys to success. My goal is to build a resource that can be used by business students and professional who are working in this space. Through providing some clarity among the millions of pages available via the web, we can help people find answers more quickly to the ways that we can help everyone across the globe get the attention that they need. And while this will never eliminate death and suffering, maybe, just maybe, librarians in Michigan can help others reduce the number of grieving parents everywhere. That is a mustard seed that would taste beautiful.
Tags: community, global health, health