Tag Archives: new delhi

Exploring the “Family” in Child Family Health International

You may have heard people refer to CFHI and those involved in the organization as part of a global family. Our ‘family’ is made up of wonderful volunteers, health care providers, devoted staff (stateside and abroad), as well as the fastest growing part of our family– more than 7,000 CFHI alumni and counting! We have been growing our family and projects for over 20 years.

CFHI is not only a global family, but we serve families. Two projects that come to mind when I think about how our work affects families are projects that target the long-distance trucking industry in India and the illegal sex workers that support this industry.

In India, young men, and boys barely out of school, travel the highway system connecting the most distant corners. The work is hard, the hours long, and the travel dangerous on the over-crowded highways connecting coast to coast. While away from home for 2-6 months at a time, many truck drivers engage in sexual activities with prostitutes. Two National Aids Control Organization (NACO)-based foundations that target this population are the Society for the Promotion of Youth and Masses (SPYM) and SWACH (Survival for Women and Children Foundation).

Actors performing skit on STD awareness at truck stop in New Delhi, India.

Both do amazing outreach and fieldwork with peer educators, some once truckers themselves. They captivate the young audience by performing skits (see photo, right), playing card games, leading monthly health camps, and offering the men free hair cuts and shaves while they talk about safe sex. SWATCH peer educators target the high-risk female sex workers~ often widowed women (some still in their teens) who have been forced into sex work to support their children. Their main activities include teaching why condom use is important, the importance of regular HIV testing and resources are available if they test HIV positive. They even teach the woman how to put on a condom on men in the dark by demonstrating how to put a condom on a model blind-folded! Challenges ahead include rehabilitation training for the sex workers.

The family in Child Family Health International is both our global family of staff and local health care providers that make CFHI Global Health Education Programs the amazing experiences they are, and the network of folks, our alumni, who have been touched by CFHI’s transformative programs, as well as the families served by CFHI programs and reinvestment in host communities.

International Women’s Day- A Story From CFHI India

CFHI Convenes UN Forum on MDG 3 Empowerment of Women

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Earlier this month on September 15, 2010, CFHI convened a Forum on the Empowerment of Women, at the United Nations in New York. The purpose of the event was to increase awareness of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal #3, to Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Under-Secretary General and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, moderated a panel of women representing a cross section of leadership roles. As world leaders met this past week to discuss the MDGs, this Forum, held a week in advance, provided an opportunity for the voices of women from everyday life t be heard. Co-sponsoring NGOs included the NGO Committee on Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns, The International Center for Good Business, The Institute of International Social Development, and The Spiritual United Nations. Panelists included M. Christine MacMillan, Commissioner, Director of the International Social Justice Commission of the Salvation Army, Monika Mitchell, Executive Director, Good Business International, Hema Pandey, India Coordinator, Child Family Health International, and Jessica Evert, MD, Medical Director, Child Family Health International.

The Title of the Forum was Successes and Challenges of Women in Leadership Roles in Traditionally Male-Dominated Environments. As women are increasingly taking on leadership roles, it becomes important for them to share their experience. The panelists spoke with examples from their own lives and the audience was invited to share their comments and life experience as well.

We were especially happy to welcome our India Coordinator, Ms. Hema Pandey who was visiting from New Delhi. Hema is responsible for coordinating six CFHI Global Health Immersion Programs taking place in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Dehradun, and Rishikesh, as well as multiple ongoing community health projects. In the course of this work, she manages a group of five local CFHI Medical Directors, all of whom are men. Ms. Pandey spoke of using a cooperative style of working that invites the participation of those she works with thus creating a joint feeling of ownership. This being her first trip outside of India, Ms Pandey said she was surprised to find that women in the United States also felt that they were still struggling to achieve gender equality.

As the Forum drew to a close, there was a common expression of the panelists and the audience that this Forum should become and annual event until 2015, the target year for the Millennium Development Goals.

From Untouchable to Breadwinner, From a Human Waste Disposal Problem to Useable Fertilizer: A Sanitation and Public Health Success Story

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Human waste is always a strange topic to talk about but it is clear that sanitation is one of the biggest public health challenges. The idea of a Toilet Museum may bring a laugh but I was introduced to an organization that, while understanding the lighter side of the issue, has taken this subject very seriously. “This is nothing short of amazing work,” reports CFHI India Coordinator, Hema Pandey, as she has made it an important part of CFHI’s Public Health and Community Medicine Program in New Delhi. Students also report that this experience is very enlightening to them. It is all the great work of an organization called Sulabh International, an NGO based here in New Delhi, that has for all practical purposes, solved a problem as old as the human race: how to effectively manage human waste. Moreover, they have done it in one of the poorest and most populated countries in the world. At the heart of it, was the desire to free the Scavengers, a caste of Indian society who, for as long as anyone can remember, were relegated to cleaning the excrement of others and carrying it in buckets on their heads, therefore being considered untouchable.

CFHI Students Visiting Sulabh International in New Delhi

Sulabh is nothing short of a movement, started by Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak. Dr. Pathak’s outstanding accomplishments can be summed up in two areas, a new technology for waste management and a social revolution for more than a million people to whom society gave no hope for self-determination.

The technology is alarmingly simple. Sulabh’s design of a two-pit, pour flush toilet is an appropriate, affordable, environmentally sound, and culturally acceptable technology. Many United Nations groups including WHO and UNDP have recommended this technology for more than 2.6 billion people in the world. Essentially the pits are constructed in such a way that one side can be used and filled over about a three-year period. Once it is filled, you switch to the second pit. Over the next three years, the pit design allows for the natural breakdown of the waste in the first pit so that after the three year period, the pit can be opened revealing a dried substance with no harmful bacteria, that is 100% recyclable as a high qulaity fertilizer. This design is perfect for rural areas but Dr. Pathak has taken it to the next step by designing a process of dealing with large-scale public toilets. In this process, bio gas is generated in significant portions to power lighting, heating, cooking, and electricity.

CFHI Students visiting Sulabh International

Receiving Instruction on 2-Pit Toilet System at Sulabh

Dr. Pathak is credited with changing the mindset of the Indian people about sanitation and the persons who were required to do the sanitation work. He has done this by example. He went to live among Scavengers learning the affects of the life they were considered destined to and thereby designing a social movement to raise them out of poverty and their unacceptable destiny. Sulabh has schools, training centers and successful assistance programs that are training former Scavengers for everything from light industry, to culinary and food service jobs, and all aspects of computer technology.

This is a terrific success story, making great progress for health as well as a wonderful human story, and one that definitely gets the attention of our students.

CFHI Program Spotlight: Sight for All