A World We Dare To Imagine Part 3

Helping Hand Hospitals Organization

Our mission is to bring healthcare and aid to as many people and communities as possible who do not have the resources or skills to care for themselves.

Ever since I worked in a charity hospital in Cambodia, I have had a passion for providing people basic healthcare rights. In Cambodia, people have large, debilitating acid burns and birth defects that prevent them from living normal lives because they are shunned from society. Other people live too far from any hospital that they can afford to get taken care of in time, so they end up with amputations or even death that could have been prevented by more accessible healthcare. These are the people that our organization will help.

Hospitals have started in Africa and East Asia and will continue to spread to places that have the highest need for local hospitals. This includes in rural villages with no other options when they need surgery or something only Western medicine can heal.

The organization provides donated materials to build hospitals with the minimum amount of space and tools to function. Basic wound care is provided, and with every new hospital in the rural areas they are built, volunteer doctors from first-world countries start each hospital and take care of patients. Medical students from Europe and America will be able to use these hospitals as part of their school credit and can learn from the doctors while also helping those community members who will be trained to help their people.

This organization is unique because it allows established doctors from the community, who have already completed medical schools, to enter a training and shadowing program with these volunteer doctors. The training program allows those members of a community or living nearby to train with the volunteer doctors and learn how to care for their own people. Knowing basic care and certain operational procedures is crucial to saving lives, and the local doctors will learn how best to tend to the more specific problems of the country and local community.

These hospitals are life changing for the people that are helped. The training program for local doctors allows the locals to have some say in how things are run and can know what is best for their local people. The Western doctors are essential in building a relationship and educating the locals in more ways than they have been schooled in their own country. People who need healthcare immediately no longer have to walk for two weeks to see a doctor, but rather they can find a local charity hospital where they can be taken care of in time before they develop worse, incurable diseases. People in unfortunate circumstances still deserve the chance at a healthy life, and the Helping Hands Hospitals organization will give it to them.

This organization’s first goal is to care for the people involved. In order to keep the hospitals less of a burden on the community, the hospitals are green and are created to be sustainable. People giving charity and time is how these hospitals are run, and as long as some people are generous at the beginning, once they are established the locals should be capable of running it smoothly and needing little from outside help once it is started.

World We Dare To Imagine

To make the world a better place I would start by creating charity hospitals around the world so that people have access to some form of healthcare, even if it is the most basic healthcare. Ideally we could get American doctors to train the local doctors, and if people donated equipment, the local community could eventually learn how to take care of themselves. A hospital in Cambodia was started by a doctor from America and began including Cambodian nurses and doctors, who were eventually able to go study in Europe and come back and apply their knowledge to the small hospital. Hospitals from other countries would donate equipment like an ultrasound machine. Rather than just donating these machines without knowing if the hospital staff knew how to use them, the hospitals would send doctors to that hospital for a few weeks and they would teach the Cambodian staff how to use it. This took time, but it was possible and I think more initiatives could start in other parts of Cambodia and other countries that do not have easy access to wound care or any other healthcare. The problem with many of the people I encountered at this hospital was the distance so many rural people lived from the hospital in the capital city. It took them months or years to finally reach healthcare, and by then it was often too late.

Doing work in the garbage dumps of Mexico City and other impoverished areas is good because they aren’t just donating money or supplies. The people working spend weeks there finding out what they need, and bringing equipment and supplies there such as glasses and dental care to help these people at least short term. But short term is not enough to change these people's’ lives long term, so there needs to be a program where people can stay for months or years, or continue to return to the same community, and really understand how they live and what could help them and their lifestyle. Rather than giving a kid one set of glasses once in his life, knowing his vision will change, the best thing to do is to create a program where the same community will get revisited often and have access to at least semi constant healthcare. Basic healthcare is so important, and If we give these people the tools to help their own community, more will be accomplished in the long run and people will stop dying from completely curable problems.

The Blue Sweater 2

The second part of Jacqueline’s book continues her journey in Rwanda and finding out about the women from the bakery. Jacqueline goes through many trials with getting robbed, finding out her friends had been killed, and learning that people aren’t always who she thought they were. People like Agnes and Prudence helped Jacqueline see that humans are not perfect or consistent, and the Rwandan Genocide taught her a lot about human nature. Through the many loans given to women, she learned that solving poverty isn’t just about giving money, but each situation requires different solutions. She realizes that we can be more helpful if we see everyone as a single unit, and base our poverty eradicating strategies on promoting human dignity. Jacqueline creates the Acumen Fund and attempts to support institutions rather than projects. The Acumen Fund has done some amazing things, and what I find most interesting is how Jacqueline discovers that the best way to solve poverty is not with sympathy, but with moral leadership that comes up with solutions from the point of view of the poor, rather than imposing grand ideas onto societies that work differently from what we might be used to.

Jacqueline’s experiences reminded me of my time working in a children’s hospital in Cambodia. I saw so many things I never even imagined were possible. We saw villages built on stilts on a river, and people with no money who traveled for weeks to get to the hospital. I wanted so badly to help everyone that it was really hard to realize there was no way that I could everyone I saw. And I knew that my few weeks with them, and any money or knowledge we could give them wouldn't last very long. But I also realized a lot of the things that Jacqueline discovered. Sympathy and charity weren’t going to help these people in the long run. They needed a system that could sustain them and manage the issues constantly, not being dependent on monetary donations. What was really important was not only the Western doctors who visited the hospital for a few weeks to help with patients, but the Cambodian doctors going to Europe to study from better doctors, so that they could come back and apply what they learned to best help their own people. Only the Cambodians truly knew what would help the poor and sick the most, and even though the money was important in starting these hospitals and programs, what was most beneficial was training the Cambodian people to take care of their own when the charity wasn’t always there supporting them. Education was key to getting those in poverty to move into better situations.