While most students were relaxing at home over winter break, a group of twelve Brown students was building volleyball pits and purifying drinking water in the Dominican Republic. The group consisted of eight seniors and four underclassmen, led by Ed Cheung '08 and John Molina '08.
The projects targeted issues that arise often in developing nations, including nutrition, exercise, hypertension, diabetes, environmental concerns, women's empowerment, general education, English proficiency and computer literacy. The five communities included in the project were centered around the A Mother's Wish foundation's community center and health clinic in Santiago.
Cheung said he first came up with the project idea while he was studying in Santiago, the Dominican Republic, in the fall of 2006. He volunteered at the health clinic every week, with which he got involved through Assistant Dean of Medicine Timothy Empkie.
Molina worked with the same clinic during the summer of 2007. During this time, he went from door to door and asked people what concerns they felt were important in their communities, inspiring the projects he would later work on over break. "All of our projects stemmed from the community survey," he said.
Both Cheung and Molina enjoyed their experiences so much that in September they came up with the idea for the trip, and by October they had provided applications to students interested in participating. Most of the students who went this month were interested in medicine, they said.
The group's goal was to work with community members to help them solve the problems they identified. "Our vision is not to come down and be that white hand saying, 'We know what's best for you,' because we don't," said Cheung.
Empkie helped with the logistics of the trip. "My role was primarily beforehand to help them with the preparation," he said. The project is not currently sanctioned by the University so no official approval was necessary, but one hope for the future is to develop this project into a University supported program, Empkie said.
The health clinic, called Pequeños Pasitos or "Small Steps" in Spanish, serves 1,500 people in five communities. When founded in 2003, it focused on vaccinations and trash collection. Today, it also offers prenatal care, medical examinations and medications free to the members of the community who would otherwise have no access to health care.
Once in the Dominican Republic, the students split into small groups. Each group was in charge of designing a solution to a different area of concern. The students had weekly meetings with the whole group to share ideas and discuss their progress. "One of the coolest things is that students really get control," Cheung said.
To address these concerns, many of the groups utilized educational programs. For example, with hypertension and diabetes, the group incorporated information about these conditions into the door-to-door health promotions that the clinic regularly runs.
The students set up a women's group to work on female empowerment and built a volleyball court to promote exercise. The volleyball court was one of the major successes of the initial trip because it quickly became integrated into the community, Cheung said.
Another project was to purify drinking water. The group taught community members to use a method called SODIS to purify the water. The process is simple: Fill a two liter bottle with water and leave it in direct sunlight; after six hours, the water will be clean enough to drink. "Water is a big issue," Molina said. "Water is not drinkable in most of the five communities."
One group set up an English as a Second Language program, which is currently being supervised by one of the team members studying in Santiago this semester. Since the project's goal is sustainability, the plan is to have at least one person involved in the projects year round, Molina said.
During their time working with the clinic, the students discovered other issues that they hope to address in the future. While setting up an ESL program, the students noticed that literacy in general was a problem in the communities. "Many kids couldn't write in Spanish, let alone English," Cheung said.
Both Cheung and Molina are PLME students and will continue to work with the project for at least two more years, including another trip in March. Through the next few groups of students, the two hope to find a core group that can assume leadership of the project after them.
The project is still in the development stage, and Cheung and Molina are hoping that over time they will be able to identify the problems that need to be addressed and find workable solutions for each. Cheung described the trip as a chance to put academic knowledge to practical use.
"We'll see what worked and what didn't in March," Molina said. "It's just the beginning; we know we're going to hit a lot of roadblocks."
Both Cheung and Molina felt that the experience was an excellent way to apply knowledge from different disciplines. "It's so applicable to everything," Cheung said. "Health, economics, international studies, human biology, premed, developmental studies." He said he hopes that in future trips, students from a wide variety of backgrounds will participate.
The trip was free for all volunteers because of fundraising efforts done beforehand. One quarter of the money raised went to subsidizing the trip costs for the participants. The remainder of the money is going to the clinic, Cheung said.
"I think Brown needs more options like our project," Cheung said.
