World View Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 10)

Introduction to the Issue WORKING VACATIONS We’re not talking “voluntourism” here J ennifer Brown drafts scientific documents for regulatory agencies for Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company in New York. Last year, the company sponsored her to volunteer for four months to work under different–and very difficult–conditions in a refugee camp in northern Kenya where an estimated 90,000 people from nine neighboring countries have sought refuge from famine, drought, disease and civil war. e camp is called Kakuma, for the small town it overwhelmed. Most are Sudanese, and many have been there since the camp was “founded” along this dry riverbed 15 years ago by the Lost Boys of Sudan. “An entire generation has grown up there,” Jennifer says. e new arrivals live under blue plastic. Housing in the older zones is made of mud brick, with roofs of thatch or corrugated tin. From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week and another five hours every Saturday, Jennifer Brown worked at a hospital and clinic run by the International Rescue Committee. She introduced new software databases and trained the Kenyan doctors to make sense and order of the long lines of HIV patients queuing up for their anti-retroviral medications and other treatments. When there were no-shows, staff could track them down by name and address to maintain their treatment regimes in the vast, crowded camp terrain. “She saw them each morning lining up with a variety of symptoms at the clinics,” said Pfizer senior vice president Robert Mallett, “where doctors knew the odds they had contracted malaria, for example, were so high there was no need to test for it.” Mallett was speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. a year ago. His company has manufacturing plants in 37 countries and product sales in 150. Brown, a trained chemist, a decade earlier was a Peace Corps volunteer teaching physical sciences at St. Gabriel’s School in Mouila, Gabon. Now she is one of 128 Global Health Fellows from Pfizer who, in the past four years, have received paid leave to apply their fields of expertise and do a great deal of good for those in need. Such instincts were important to nurture in their employees, Mallett told his Brookings audience, leaders of dozens of non-governmental organizations, university departments of studies, government agencies and corporations. ose in the audience had formed the Building Bridges Coalition to help repair America’s international reputation by doubling the numbers of Americans who go overseas as volunteers in the developing world. ese Coalition members seek to tap the desires of thousands of Americans who look for a few weeks or months in which to perform meaningful and often difficult work for orphans in understaffed state institutions, villagers who can’t get to market in the rainy season, refugees stuffed by the thousands into disease-ridden tent camps on drought-plagued plains. For a little more than a decade, Peace Corps has offered such short-term assignments in what until last year was called Crisis Corps. Last month they expanded the definition of that work to Peace Corps Response, continuing to focus on short-term service of three to six months for returned Peace Corps volunteers. Peace Corps’ attention to service shorter than two years speaks to increased public interest in brief overseas service and the growing number of non-profits–and forprofits–that try to respond to that need. Teachers can take sabbaticals and traders on Wall Street can take paid vacations. e challenge is to find the right organization and the right project, something that guarantees a “high impact” volunteer experience. e leaders of this burgeoning movement promise hard work, a degree of professionalism, a commitment to get to know the people you are working with, and the assurance that the orphanage, the tree planting, the brick making, the vaccination program, and the bird count are part of a long-term commitment that will make life better in that distant community. We call it a Working Vacation, a project that produces a lot of sweat, not many curios and fewer breath-taking photographs. Several years ago, Brookings scholar and former Peace Corps volunteer Lex Rieffel sensed the trend when he re-opened discussion on Peace Corps reform. His work led to the creation of the Building Bridges Coalition. One of its prime movers, Steve Rosenthal, says government, universities, corporations and non-profits wanted to see how they could make a sharp and sustainable increase in overseas volunteerism “a national priority to counteract the negative image America has received. We felt that international volunteerism was one of the most powerful forces in improving the image of the United States overseas.” An immediate priority became a doubling of the Peace Corps’ presence in the developing world, and similar increases in the non-profit world. While Peace Corps has not been an active participant at these Brookings gatherings, Rosenthal says NPCA’s 10 Spring 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of World View Magazine - Spring 2008

World View Magazine - Spring 2008
Contents
From the President
Lafayette Park
Your Turn
Gallery
Note to Readers
Introduction to the Issue
Engaging Masons
Commentary
Letter from Guatemala
Links of a Chain
Gallery
Science for Good
Letter from Jima
Another Country
Letter from Accra
Community News

World View Magazine - Spring 2008

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