Upcoming talks

When I first began learning about Haiti back in high school, I was given the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by 6 people. After reading the book, my first thought was " I want to meet this man!" When I was on my way out of my high school library, the librarian saw the book under my arm and asked me how I liked it. When I told her that I loved it and would love to meet either the author or Dr. Farmer himself, she told me that Tracy Kidder was her neighbor. She gave me Tracy Kidder's email address and in a heartbeat I was sitting at a computer typing him up a long email telling him about my life and how I made it to an elite boarding school on a full scholarship having come from a lifetime of poverty. He wrote me back with his telephone number and asked for me to call him. That night, I sat in my dorm room chatting with Tracy Kidder himself for nearly an hour about what it was like to follow Dr. Farmer in Haiti and how he ever put into words what he experienced. I'll never forget what he told me that night when I mentioned how much I would love to go to Haiti and work someday. He said, "We're talking about life and death here. Working in a poor country like Haiti is not as romantic as it sounds." That line has resonated with me for the last six years. After that conversation, he put me in touch with Dr. Farmer's office and over the next several years I met Dr. Farmer on several occasions and was ultimately convinced by him to defer medical school for a year and follow my passion for public health in Haiti. Next week, President Ruth Simmons has invited me to join her and Dr. Farmer for dinner. I haven't seen him in over two years so I'm very excited.

Following Tracy Kidder's invite to Roger Williams University yesterday, I've been invited to give a presentation on my work in Haiti and to discuss the book Mountains Beyond Mountains written by Tracy Kidder and how the book inspired me to work in Haiti. The talk will be on October 6th at 7pm at MNS 200. A dinner with faculty and students will precede the presentation.

March 24th-25th, 2011, I've been invited to Wilmington College in Ohio to be a speaker as a part of the Issues & Artists Series. A dinner with students and faculty will precede the event. The formal program begins at 7:30 p.m. (45 minute presentation followed by 15-30 minutes of Q&A), followed by a reception.

An Overview of the Issues & Artists Series:

The Issues & Artists series at Wilmington College provides an opportunity for cultural and intellectual enrichment for students, faculty, and the community-at-large. Wilmington College is a Quaker-affiliated liberal arts college whose mission requires the integration of character-building into the curriculum and mandates that students be educated on global issues. This series of lectures, performances, and presentations helps fulfill this mission by broadening cultural horizons and educating the audience on compelling social issues. The series also seeks to foster a respect for and an awareness of each individual’s place in the global community.

The audience for these events is made up of students (75%), faculty and staff (15%), and members of the wider community (10%). The size of the audience for previous events has ranged from 175 to 450 people, depending on the appeal of the program, the connection to courses offered at the time, and factors outside of our control – weather, other events in the College and surrounding community, etc.

jetBlue has generously sponsored my next 5 flights to get me to Haiti. Since they do not fly directly to Haiti, they will fly me to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. I am still fundraising for the short round trip flight from Santo Domingo to Port au Prince (~$250). Please consider donating. Every little bit counts!

I am currently working with American Airlines to have them become my long-term sponsor but jetBlue stepped forward and offered to support me until I find another airline that flies directly to Haiti.

Thank you jetBlue!!!

Hope for Haiti, Brown University student team up to bring medical know-how to Haiti

-Naplesnews.com

Brown University medical student Will Perez, center, teaches a first-aid lesson as part of a public health program during the summer of 2008 in Haiti. The students of the program and Perez visited a local clinic to practice their CPR and Heimlich Maneuvers skills. Perez has since teamed up with the Naples-based Hope for Haiti to implement the public health programs at a larger scope within the Caribbean nation. Photo courtesy of Will Perez.

NAPLES — Mike Stewart knows that getting a small cut in Haiti could mean the difference between life and death.

Stewart, the country director for Naples-based nonprofit Hope for Haiti, said preventive care is a necessity for residents who might not have easy access to a doctor or a hospital.

“Prevention saves so much in the long run,” he said. “A minor cut that is untreated can lead to tetanus. A minor cold can turn into pneumonia.”

Hope for Haiti’s mission has always been about helping Haitians lead better lives, particularly with education and medical initiatives. Now, with the help of a 24-year-old Rhode Island medical student, the organization is looking to take that next step _ educating Haitians about preventive health care.

Hope for Haiti was approached for the project by Will Perez, a 24-year-old Brown University medical student. Perez, who was living and working at Proje Espwa orphanage in Les Cayes, Haiti, in 2008-09, met Stewart and Hope for Haiti’s Vice President Tiffany Kuehner when he was living and working in the country.

“We would have meetings in the Hope for Haiti house,” he said. “They would give me medical supplies.”

Perez’s idea was to create a program to empower Haitians to identify and address issues like first aid, nutrition and malaria eradication within their community to better public health.

Quotable

“The main (issues) we’re dealing with come from dirty water, hygiene issues and sanitation. We are talking about villages with no doctors to speak of,” said Will Perez, a 24-year-old Brown University medical student. “We want to train the Haitian youth to become health leaders in their communities because there are no doctors.”

“The main (issues) we’re dealing with come from dirty water, hygiene issues and sanitation. We are talking about villages with no doctors to speak of,” he said. “We want to train the Haitian youth to become health leaders in their communities because there are no doctors.”

Perez’s timing was perfect, as Hope for Haiti was embarking on its own public health initiative, a community health outreach to be implemented at 25 primary schools.

“We have been putting out fires for so long, it is nice to be to a place where we can focus on public health,” Kuehner said. “I think the idea of bringing preventive care to Cayes is exciting.”

Since starting the initiative, more than 2,500 children and families have been educated in hygiene, clean water and the importance of Vitamin A in Hope for Haiti’s primary schools, according to the organization. About 6,000 Vitamin A pills, de-worming medication, prenatal and multivitamins have been distributed among the 25 schools, according to Hope for Haiti.

Kuehner said Perez’s program was a good supplement to what Hope for Haiti was already trying to do.

“Our program was so successful, we were looking for a way to build on it,” she said. “We can be the ones who implement Will’s plan because he is still in medical school. It is the best way to leverage our resources.”

Kuehner said the first order of business was to adapt Perez’s training manual to Hope for Haiti’s needs. Perez had designed his training

How to help

For more information on relief efforts still going on in Haiti:

■ American Red Cross: To find out more of the American Red Cross’ efforts in Haiti visit www.redcross.org/Haiti.

■ Hope for Haiti: To find out more of Hope for Haiti’s ongoing efforts in Haiti, visit the nonprofit’s office at 1021 Fifth Ave. N. in Naples or call (239) 434-7183. Visit www.hopeforhaiti.com.

■Nehemiah Evangelical Church: To find out more of the church’s efforts in Haiti, go to www.thenem.org or call (239) 304-8648.

program around the Proje Espwa orphanage and the manual needed to be adapted to work with schools and local communities, Kuehner said.

Perez, who hopes to continue working in Haiti after he graduates _ practicing “political medicine” _ flew to Les Cayes earlier this month to meet with Hope for Haiti’s community nurses. They had nine days to work on the 100-page training manual, which will be used to train community workers in everything from how to treat malaria to CPR.

“We want to make them the most adaptable and the most sustainable that we can,” he said.

The plan, Perez said, is that community leaders chosen by their villages will participate in the program. For six months, they will come to a central location once a month to be trained in one aspect of the public health manual.

“After three or four days, they will go back to their villages. It will be up to them to make presentations and give speeches and talks,” he said. “It will all be documented. Every month they will come, learn the material, go back and teach it to the people in their villages.”

Kuehner said editing of the manual is continuing and will be approved by Hope for Haiti’s health-care director, Dr. Steeve Victory, and the organization’s board before the program is implemented.

Last month, Perez was one of five young social entrepreneurs chosen as a finalist for the Do Something Awards, which aired on VH1, Comcast cable 23, and honors the best young world-changers under 25. Perez received a $10,000 grant and was up for the $100,000 prize, which he was going to use to help Hope for Haiti implement his program. Although he didn’t win, Perez said the notoriety has been good for his cause.

“It’s great to keep Haiti in the limelight like this,” he said. “The Wyclef thing (Haitian musician Wyclef Jean was denied a run for the presidency by the Haitian government) has been taking precedence. Everyone wants to know about Wyclef. The Do Something Awards has allowed me to show people the public health programs and the effect they’ve had and how they’ve grown. It’s really exciting to see where this is going to go.”

Fast Company Magazine Article-October 2010 Issue

Med Student Pioneers Political Medicine in Rural Haiti

It’s the morning before Will Perez leaves for Haiti. The Providence, Rhode Island, medical student has been busy. For one thing, there’s school. But that’s just the beginning: Perez has also helped set up a Haiti-U.S. study abroad program; organized earthquake-relief efforts for Brown University; and is setting up a range of public-health campaigns in rural Haiti. For all this good work, Perez just won a $10,000 DoSomething award--money that will go toward the love of his life: improving medical care in the Caribbean nation that has become his great cause.

Perez was in Haiti long before the earthquake drew thousands of do-gooders to the country--he first flew out the day after he graduated from Brown University in 2008. It was a huge post-college step to take, but it was one that he had long planned for, ever since he finished high school and received six copies of Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” an account of Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti with the not-for-profit Partners in Health. Perez “took it as a sign,” he says, and spent much of his college career learning about Haiti’s culture, religion, and language. Then, during his senior year at Brown, he met Farmer, who encouraged him to take time off before med school. So after spending a week and a half at a Haitian orphanage that housed about 600 children, Perez made his choice: He deferred medical school for a year (he’d been accepted early to Brown’s Alpert Medical School) to do community-health work in rural Haiti.

After the decision came six months of vigorous planning and fundraising. “I started applying for money, for grants and scholarships, so I could do down there with some money in pocket,” Perez says. He had to pay for everything himself--plane tickets, living expenses, all the health initiatives he intended to start. Perez, who was homeless for about half of his childhood and was on a full scholarship at Brown, got creative: Besides getting grant money from Brown, he worked at Starbucks and gave ballroom-dance lessons (he danced competitively for five years). By the time the half-year was up, he had about $40,000. He also had a plan to treat--and stop--tuberculosis.

You might call that a beginner’s mistake. It wasn’t that his plan was a bad one. Rather, when Perez arrived in Haiti, he found that tuberculosis wasn’t the most urgent issue, as he’d thought. “Our first program ended up being bedbugs,” he says, “because that’s what everyone was complaining about.”

Getting rid of bedbugs anywhere--let alone a crowded orphanage--is no easy task, and it taught him an important lesson. “Obviously I couldn’t do all this public health work by myself,” he says, “so I began taking in Haitian youth.” He trained the kids in public health, making sure they really “understood the material and [could] put it in a context that rural villagers would understand.”

The bedbug-eradication program ate up about three-quarters of the money Perez had raised. Eventually, Perez says, “I didn’t even have money to live.” Luckily, he did have access to a computer. Posts on the blog he kept to stay in touch with friends and family made their way around the Internet, and he quickly realized that he had a powerful fundraising tool. “I was complaining about all of these things”--no refrigeration for vaccines, for instance--“not really expecting anyone to respond,” he says. “But they did.” Donors poured out about $250,000.

With that money, Perez and his low-budget team of students introduced 14 public-health programs, including oral hygiene, nutrition, and scabies treatment and prevention. And they were deeply successful: Malaria rates, for instance, dropped by more than 60 percent in the orphanage thanks to the malaria campaign.

Perez returned to the U.S. and started medical school. But his work in Haiti remained constant. He worked with the president of Brown to create a task force to organize the university’s earthquake relief efforts. And he helped set up a medical-student exchange program between several Haitian schools and Brown.

Amid all of this, Perez planned his current trip to Haiti. He’s teaming up with the not-for-profit Hope for Haiti to train community-health workers to bring his public health program to about 50,000 more people. Collaborating with Hope for Haiti is key, Perez says, so he can “join forces” with an established organization instead of trying to start anew. “When I’m done, this public health program is going to be Hope for Haiti’s public health program,” he says, explaining why it’s important to have Haitian nurses teach--and personalize--the material. “I introduced it but now I want them to own it. And that’s how I can guarantee that when I leave it will continue on.”

As usual, Perez is traveling alone. “It’s important for me not to kind of overwhelm a community when I first walk into it,” he says. If people who don’t speak Haitian Creole come in, “they’re immediately outsiders.” He believes that, on the first day of his year-long journey, speaking his first Haitian Creole word was the ticket to acceptance. “That was pretty much the selling point,” he says. “They were so impressed that this white man was speaking Creole.”

Perez will keep traveling to Haiti throughout medical school. Asked whether he’ll continue working in political medicine (as he calls it) after graduating, he answers quickly: “It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.” But he doesn’t intend to limit his work to Haiti. Instead, he plans to use the programs he sets up there as a model to bring around the world, hopeful that he can spread the idea of health care as a human right, “regardless of social status, regardless of economic status.”

As for his idol, Paul Farmer, Perez hasn’t talked to him since they first met, he says. “I figure that he’ll hear of me soon enough.”

http://www.fastcompany.com/1675208/med-student-pioneers-political-medicine-in-rural-haiti

Hope For Haiti Partnership

My blog is back! Though my official website is now up at www.willinhaiti.org, I will continue to use this blog as a way of updating you on any work that I'm doing in Haiti.

I've recently partnered with a large non-profit in Les Cayes, Haiti to bring my public health training programs to another 50,000 rural Haitians from 40 villages and 10,000 students from 40 schools.

By collaborating with Hope for Haiti we are building a strong public health education program that focuses on training community health workers in preventive care, first aid attention, emergency preparedness, and crisis management. Our goal is for this comprehensive public health program to be available throughout all of Hope for Haiti supported schools. Run and lead by Hope for Haiti’s medical staff in Les Cayes, trained community health workers will be integrated into Hope for Haiti’s on-going education program impacting the lives of students as well as their families and community members within southern Haiti.

Sample of Desired Outcomes:

1. Earlier detection of treatable health problems due to the increased availability of basic first aid and local knowledge about health and malnutrition.

2. Earlier identification of malnutrition and common diseases that can then be addressed by other Hope for Haiti-supported projects.

3. Initiation of community sanitation or other health-related initiatives lead by trained community workers, teachers and their students.

4. Integration of all schools with Hope for Haiti’s existing medications distribution network.

5. Increased quality of medical care to all schools through medical team visits and regular follow-up care.

6. Improved health among students resulting in improved school attendance and academic performance.

7. Improved health within students’ families allowing for more effective employment of their labor and reduced need to use scarce funds for health-related purposes.

8. Improved coordination of patient medical records between various school systems in the same geographic region.

9. Community emergency plans in place in preparation for a natural, political, or social crisis.

10. Emergency supply kits safely stored for immediate distribution.

Brown Medical School Concentration Program

A. Project Title

Public Health Education and Training Program for Haitian Youth in Rural Haiti

B. Cross-Disciplinary Content

My concentration involves an amalgamation of academic disciplines including public health, preventative medicine, epidemiology, education, anthropology, sociology, infectious disease, international relations, public policy and private sector organizations.

The mission of my work is to mobilize communities in Haiti by empowering Haitians to take control over their own health. I am doing this by equipping them with the tools they need to save their own lives. My goals are to improve the health of rural Haitians and the death toll imposed on them by the constraints of poverty. These efforts are most important in rural Haiti where there are no doctors and where the people themselves are there own medical community. The goals are to educate Haitian youth to become leaders in their own communities as trained community health workers.

By teaching local volunteers information about a variety of issues including hygiene, sanitation, nutrition, and water quality, along with testing, treatment, and prevention strategies aimed at reducing the incidence of diseases common in the area, countless lives are being saved and communities of people are being empowered. I currently have 14 public health programs on these issues just short of celebrating their two-year anniversary.

Using several medical texts and drawing largely on the expertise of doctors both in and out of Haiti, I designed a 3-month public health training course to develop a working public health team of youth living in Les Cayes, Haiti. The program has since graduated 16 young adults. As community health workers, they help teach health education classes, perform mass treatment programs for scabies and ringworm, and administer TB and malaria medications using directly-observed therapy, among many other things. Aside from engaging the community in public health issues, and providing sustainable methods of treatment for hundreds of people, these youth have become leaders in their communities and looked upon with incredible respect. Their work is inspiring to their peers as can be seen in the long list of young adults waiting for their chance to join the public health group. My training program is the only one like it in the southwestern region of the country and has quickly become a model for health education in rural Haiti. Recognizing that prevention is by far the most cost-effective and sure way of eliminating the diseases endemic to this country and the unnecessary deaths that are the result, other health organizations in northern Haiti are beginning to adopt the my public health training program.

C. In-Depth Summer Experience

My project will involve two trips. The first will be from March 26-April 4 and the second will be from June 25-August 15.

My immediate goal for the public health program is to identify the parts that are adaptable to other regions in Haiti. The program I have already developed and the team that I have trained is specific to the southwestern region. While many aspects of the program may not need to be changed, Haiti is a diverse nation both in geography and population. For these reasons, a national approach to public health training would require a program that is easily modifiable and readily adaptable to any region of Haiti.

My short-term goals include continued fundraising and mobilization of the Brown community. To identify doctors, public health and medical students interested in working in Haiti as teaching staff for the public health training program. My long-term goals include identifying key partnerships with other organizations throughout Haiti, which can benefit from the strengths of the public health program, both in regards to the training and employment of community health workers.

During my March trip, I will be returning to Pwoje Espwa to evaluate the progress of the public health programs that I initiated 18 months ago and the management of these programs by the public health team. The goals of this trip will be to assess the success of the community health training program by evaluating the progress the public health team has made over the last six months since my departure from Haiti. I will do this by interviewing the public health team, children and staff at Pwoje Espwa and community members from local villages. While the focus of this trip will be on the training program and not the active public health programs (PHPs) themselves, the success of these programs will largely reflect the success of the public health team responsible for them. I will be looking to identify any of the PHPs that are not running smoothly and to determine their level of sustainability and what can be changed to improve them.

Over the next three months, I will be in contact with other organizations, clinics and doctors in Haiti in preparation of visiting them over the summer to assess their needs for public health education and the feasibility of adopting my model for public health training.

During the summer months, I will focus on editing lesson plans and brainstorming intervention methods to incorporate the training program into other settings. I will visit several pre-identified sites throughout Haiti and select one or two of them to become the next areas to incorporate a public health training program in their communities.

By focusing on the needs of specific populations, my project will prove more effective than a “cookie cutter” approach that assumes no change in different regions throughout the country. I will be bringing attention to the importance of community development through the education and empowerment of the youth within the community being reached.

The devastation brought on by the 2010 earthquake has rendered many of Haiti’s medical organizations, nonfunctioning. While the need for on the ground training in first aid and basic skills regarding preventative medicine have never been greater, it may prove to be difficult to locate organizations willing to adopt a new program into their already overwhelmed systems. For this reason, it is crucial to make sure the training program is as “user-friendly” and easy to implement as possible.

I’m striving to be more than just a physician. I want to be an advocate for human rights, a voice for those whose voice goes unheard and a face for the poorest of the poor. I don’t imagine myself in a hospital or in a lab. I’m interested in political medicine, changing policy, the way medicine is practiced, the way it is distributed, and how it is defined. I believe in a universal standard of care available to all. My goal after medical school is to join Cornell’s dual residency program that will allow me to spend every other month working in Haiti.

D. Timeline of Activities

During my second year of medical school, I plan to continue evaluating the public health teams that have been established in Les Cayes and the additional program(s) that were established in the summer of 2010 in a region other than Les Cayes.
I plan to take BIOL 3710 F Medical Spanish to help me to refine my Spanish skills considering all of the conversations that I have with Cuban doctors in Haiti and BIOL 3710 An Introduction to Tropical Medicine.

During year three, I plan to document the progress of the satellite public health training programs and draft a proposal for a nationwide public health education program that can be incorporated into the curriculum of schools, hospitals and clinics throughout the country, including and most importantly, outreach to those villages and communities in rural Haiti that lack access to schools and basic health care.

I plan to take

During year four, I plan to present the results of the training program to the Haitian minister of health, advocating for the formation of a national public health education and training program that would be under the auspices of the Haitian government.

Between my third and fourth years, I’m interested in taking the following clinical electives; Urgent Care, Tropical Medicine in East Africa, Public Health and Primary Care in Rural Honduras, Pediatrics in a Developing Country, and Internal Medicine in the Dominican Republic.

E. Final Scholarly Product

A collection of public health training manuals specific to at least two regions in Haiti including rural and urban areas.

Salsa for Haiti