Surgery and Healing in the Developing World - Dartmouth-Hitchcock

CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 45
The Impact of a Volunteer Medical Mission
on the Attitudes, Knowledge Base,
and Reported Humanitarian Motivations
of a Group of Medical and Public Health
Students
Glenn W. Geelhoed
Introduction: Service Learning in a Medical Mission
and Its Effect on Entering Health Care Students
What is the effect of “service learning” in health care students’ personal growth
and understanding in helping poor and needy patient populations in a time of acute
distress? The people of the island of Hispaniola have just suffered the worst natural
disaster in Caribbean history. In response to this need, a team of eighteen volunteers
were mobilized for a medical relief mission beginning in the Dominican Republic,
(DR) and continuing on across the rugged border into Haiti for hard-hit populations
in each country. The team arrived in Santo Domingo, the DR capital and
concentrated on the devastated border town of Jimani, where 450 bodies were recovered
from the flood and mudslide occurring in late May, an estimated ten percent
of those who disappeared. We worked for a week in two refugee camps, one for
Haitian immigrant squatters who were homeless, and the other a resettlement for
Dominicans who could prove prior citizenship, and then also in the shell of the
“Hopital General Melenciano,” also damaged in the mudslides through the town,
which had just been cleared of mud and debris for us to use as our base of operations.
We then proceeded through rather chaotic connections through the nearly impassable
eroded “roads” into the Central Plateau of Haiti, and repeated the process
in Haitian populations of the Creole-speaking rural poor using the Project MediShare
base in Thumonde previously set up by team leaders last year in a GWUMC affiliation.
We carried medical supplies in setting up our mobile clinics throughout
Marmonte District (previously “given” to me by the Haitian Health Minister last
year) using SUV’s rented from and returned to Haiti’s capital of Port au Prince. Our
clinics were set up in rural churches beyond public services of electrical, plumbing
or transportation services and all consultations and medicines were rendered free to
the eligible populations. We treated 761 patients in the DR settings and 1,058 in
Haiti with the team of supervised first-time clinicians, and carried on an intensive
Surgery and Healing in the Developing World, edited by Glenn Geelhoed.
©2005 Landes Bioscience.