GlobeMed’s Values - excerpts from speech delivered at annual Summit
Posted by Victor Roy on April 6, 2008
The following contains excerpts from a speech delivered by GlobeMed's Executive Director, Victor Roy, at the benefit dinner which concluded GlobeMed's second Annual Global Health Summit on April 5th in Evanston, IL. “Each of the students in this room, and I would suspect, all of us in this room - otherwise we wouldn't be here tonight - share a common belief. That perhaps the deficit we often experience -- the deficit in valuing human life, valuing human relationships, and valuing human health -- no matter your place of birth and residence - might be worth our time to address. If the students in this room and the leaders these students work with in communities across the world are any example, then surely this belief is rooted in some thing more than imagination.” “I noted before that our belief is rooted in some thing more than imagination. What allows us to do …Keep Reading
GlobeMed: Taking the road of pragmatic solidarity
Posted by Peter Luckow on February 4, 2008
Our generation has come to an important crossroads. At this moment, interest in the work of advancing health and social justice is at an unprecedented high. We have reached the time where we must choose to continue on the path of charity or to embark on a new path of pragmatic solidarity. We have been born into a world of charity. A world of “us” and “them” (us with the answers vs. them that need to be saved). A world of surface level problems with surface level solutions. A world filled with good intentions. Yet one in which the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. Pragmatic solidarity is about communities coming together for mutual understanding. It’s about digging deeper to truly understand the root causes of surface level problems. Just as Bertolt Brecht did nearly a century ago, it’s about asking “Where does the damp come …Keep Reading
To hell with good intentions
Posted by Peter Luckow on January 21, 2008
At last year’s GlobeMed Global Health Summit, Professor Michael Diamond from Northwestern University led a workshop on “Going Beyond Compassion”. In it, Dr. Diamond introduced a completely different, moreover discouraging, assertion that is often not considered by global health student-volunteers: is it possible that the efforts of major relief programs, like the Red Cross, actually hurt the health of communities instead of advancing it? Somebody brought up their experience in Nicaragua: students at one campus had spent three months collecting clothes and shoes for a service trip. However, when they arrived with the supplies, the volunteers found that their efforts were in fact “a waste;” Nicaraguans not only rejected the clothes, but were furthermore offended at the gesture. Relief coordinators explained that the villagers could not have been less interested in clothes – “Did you students ever stop and realize it’s not what you think they [Nicaraguans] need, but what they …Keep Reading
