"Want to Volunteer?" -- by Meredith Bowen

Want to Volunteer?

I just read one of the recent blog entries and it reminded me that the whole purpose of Episcopalians’ for Global Reconciliation is to inspire people to do what they can – to find out What One Person Can Do and to revel in the amazing effects that One Person can have on the world.

I, in turn, felt inspired to offer some ideas about getting involved. I am currently the Volunteer Coordinator for the Foundation for African Medicine and Education. We have had a flurry of activity recently at the FAME Clinic in Karatu, Tanzania – with visiting doctors and nurses. These docs and nurses volunteer their time for a few weeks a year, helping to bring medical care to those in need.

Are you a doctor? A nurse? Have a few weeks to volunteer? Check out www.fameafrica.org.

Not a doctor or a nurse, but have some time to volunteer? Always wanted to volunteer in a foreign country? Or right here at home in the US? Then GO FOR IT!!! The internet is at your finger tips, waiting to offer suggestions. Ask friends and family for recommendations. Find a project that inspires you to jump in and help out!

As we embark on 2009, I challenge you to volunteer. Here are some of our recent volunteers – inspiring you to DO WHAT YOU CAN!!!

Meredith Bowen -is a student at law school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, spending the fall semester in Arusha, Tanzania doing an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. Started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.

"Waiting" -- by Meredith Bowen

Waiting.

As we wait for the momentous climax of the advent season, many other people sit waiting too.

But not for Christmas.

They wait in line for medication. ARV’s. Drugs needed each month in order to delay the effects of the AIDS virus.

Last week I travelled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I visited an AIDS clinic, where people sat waiting for their medications.

Waiting and waiting.

I met a young Maasai girl who had been waiting for hours. She hadn’t eaten. She hadn’t moved. She lay in the grass, waiting.

She didn’t complain. She didn’t pout or cry. Her courage in the face of a disease that is killing her was astonishing to me.

She reminded me that we are essentially all waiting for the same thing – she for medications, and I for a cure. We both wait for the suffering to end.

Pray this Christmas season for an end to the suffering. For this little girl and for all the others in the world suffering as she is.

Meredith Bowen is an Episcopal young adult living in Tanzania. She has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. Started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.

"Aiden's Story: Not 'Just Another Death'" -- by Meredith Bowen

The past few days have been some of the most joyous and the most painful of my life. And although the recent events are personal, and not work related, I have decided to share them anyway. I have decided to blog about the past few days with the hope that sharing will help me to heal.

Last Wednesday I received a call from a Tanzanian friend of mine in Arusha. He is a social worker and a village leader. People often seek him out for advice. A young couple had come to him in need of help. Both are HIV positive. Although they are not married, they are in a serious relationship. Despite their best efforts, they had become pregnant. Pregnancies are incredibly difficult on HIV positive women. In addition, this couple had no intentions of starting a family.

This is where I came in. I got the phone call asking if I would be interested in adopting their baby. As many of you know, I am planning to adopt in the coming year. So, I said that I would love to meet them and make sure that they fully understood what an adoption really meant.

I drove to Arusha and was informed that the mother – Stella – had been admitted to a local hospital with contractions. I went to the hospital and spoke with the couple. I had my Tanzanian lawyer join us and asses the situation. The couple was already incredibly informed and their decision was a conscious one.

I asked if she would be willing to transfer to another hospital in town – the “best” option - and undergo a c-section in order to reduce the risk of HIV transmission. She agreed.

I took her to this hospital’s “best” ob-gyn in Arusha and had her checked out. He said the contractions were Braxton Hicks and that he would do the c-section on Monday the 13th.

Unprepared for a newborn, I spent the weekend with friends shopping for supplies, thinking about names, celebrating the immanent arrival. I visited the mother each day and we spoke about the future of her little boy or girl.

Monday finally arrived. I drove to the hospital first thing and invited myself into the surgical room but missed the actual birth by a few minutes. It was a boy. He was born at 10am on Monday the 13th of October 2008. I named him Aiden.

Unfortunately, he came out covered in meconium. As all mothers know, that is the first stool after the baby is born. Releasing the meconium in utero is a sign of stress on the baby. He weighed 3.0kg – 6 ½ pounds – a great weight for an African baby born to a mother with HIV. The mother made it through the surgery well.

Everyone said that the baby was doing fine and that meconium is not a big deal. He was seen by Tanzanian doctors and nurses, as well as two American doctors who are doing a visiting rotation at this hospital.

The baby spent most of the day in an incubator – with oxygen – and iv antibiotics. Around 5pm I finally got to hold him. I never expected to adopt a new born. It was a blessing I thought was too rare a miracle. Holding him was one of the most joyous moments of my life – imagining our lives together.

But I had been coming down with a head cold all weekend and decided that I would return to where I had been staying with friends for the night – get some sleep and some cold meds – and head back to the hospital in the morning. I wasn’t going to be any good with a cold.

I returned to the hospital Tuesday morning. The baby’s father was waiting.

The baby had died.

The hospital form said that he died of respitory arrest at 6:40pm. Just moments after I left.

It was one of the saddest days of my life.

I have faith that I will survive this and that all of this was meant to happen - that one day I will realize why and for what purpose. In the mean time I am simply trying to breath.

In the midst of my grief, it has been incredibly obvious to me that had this baby been in the US he might have survived. There is no way to know for sure. But I am positive that the medical care in Arusha where we went was some of the worst I have ever seen. In addition to terrible facilities, the staff had nothing invested in their jobs. At 7pm when the baby died, there were NO doctors on the entire medical campus. They had all gone home for dinner. The nurses were basically useless. Even the morning I was told that the baby had died, no one seemed to care. Just another death. Just another expendable life.

We will never know what really happened, what was really wrong with Aiden, or what could have been done to save him.

I realize what a blessing it is to work here in Karatu with doctors and nurses who actually care and are properly trained. They are a rare commodity.

Please pray for Aiden. That he is resting comfortably with the angels.

Please pray for Aiden’s mother, Stella, that she fully recovers from the surgery and this tragedy.

Read Meredith's update on Stella's health on The African Orphan Education Fund blog.

Meredith Bowen is an Episcopal young adult living in Tanzania. She has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. Started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.

"FAME and MDG adventure in Tanzania" -- by Meredith Bowen

I am about two weeks from embarking on a new MDG adventure and I would like to share it with the readers of this blog.

I have volunteered in Tanzania four times over the past four years, and in two weeks I will be heading back that way. I graduated from law school here in Ohio in May and took a job with The Foundation for African Medicine and Education (FAME) - located in Karatu, Tanzania.

Dr. Frank Artress and his wife, Susan, began their endeavors in Tanzania four years ago. Just this past spring, construction was finally completed on their out-patient clinic. Once funds are raised, an entire in-patient surgical wing will be built as well. This past May the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle carried an enormous story about Dr. Frank and his work.

Interest in FAME has exploded and potential volunteers are lining up! So, I will be heading up the Volunteer Program onsite.

I am incredibly excited about this new position and the work that awaits me. I will be blogging about my work there from my website - located on the "News" page.

Tanzania is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world and is among those with the highest rate of AIDS in the world. The leading medical concerns include AIDS, TB, malaria, pneumonia and dysentery. And with only one medical doctor for every 25,000 people, Tanzania faces one of the lowest doctor/patient ratios in the world.

I encourage you to take the time to read the San Fran Chronicle article - or check out FAME's website.

Stay tuned for stories from Tanzania!

Meredith Bowen is a recent graduate of the law school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In 2007, she spent the fall semester in Arusha, Tanzania doing an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. Started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.

"How Much is Enough" -- by Meredith Bowen

This past weekend I hosted a fundraising event in my home town - in order to raise awareness and funds for the orphanange in Tanzania where I have volunteered. At the beginning of the evening a gentleman approached me and asked "How much?" "Excuse me?" I replied. He wanted to know how much was "enough" - he had a check in his pocket, he had come prepared to donate - I appreciated that. However, I was thrown. I had never been asked how much before. And I have been fundraising for years now. I didn't have an answer for him. I suggested that maybe he come back to me later in the evening, give me some time to think it over.

Why was this such a difficult question? More important, why did it upset me that this man had asked? As the evening began to come to a close - having been bothered by this encounter all night - it came to me.

There is no answer. At least not one that I will ever give. The answer is personal. If I give an amount I have basically let that person "off the hook" of having to decide themselves.

At the end of the evening I spoke briefly about my love for the orphans that I had been so fortunate to love over these last four years. I was frank with the crowd, encouraging them to write checks to support this endeavor. And I said, "If you are wondering how much is enough, "enough" would be the amount that you hope the person sitting next to you will make their check out for, especially if these children were your children. Because they are all of ours."

Meredith Bowen is at law school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, spending the fall semester in Arusha, Tanzania doing an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. Started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.

A Doctor's Story -- from The Lancet

Meredith Bowen, who blogs in this spot, sends this note with this article:

"I would love to share the following Journal Article from The Lancet about a doctor that I am going to have the pleasure and honor of working for in the coming year." The article is from The Lancet – Infectious Disease Medical Journal.

At what was surely the largest ever Lunch with The Lancet, 17 of us sat down in Arusha, Tanzania, with Frank Artress. Artress is no stranger to Africa. He was born in Ethiopia, where his father was a missionary doctor. But he was raised in California, where he finished medical school and trained as a cardiac anaesthesiologist. He returned to Africa after a life-changing, nearly life-ending, experience.

About 6 years ago, on a trip to Tanzania “My wife Susan and I fell in love with the country and the people. We decided to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for my 50th and Susan's 40th birthday. It was a wonderful, uneventful climb for the first 5 days, until we stopped for lunch at 18,000 feet, and I went into full-blown high-altitude pulmonary oedema. I realized there was less than a 25% chance that I would make it off the mountain alive. Sitting up there, facing those odds, was a pretty powerful spiritual experience. Suddenly my ‘previous life’ seemed rather shallow and self-serving, and the thought of dying then without having had the opportunity to give more back to society was a bit overwhelming”.

36 hours later, with the heroic efforts of guides and porters, they made it down the mountain. Artress was treated by a doctor who said that he would recover, but “they sure needed doctors in Tanzania a whole lot more than they needed doctors in California. We thought about this for 24 hours, and both decided that it was the right time to make a change and do something different with our lives. We flew home, quit our jobs, sold or gave away most everything we had, and formed the non-profit Foundation for African Medicine and Education (FAME); and moved to Tanzania.”

To combat a “mind-bogglingly steep learning curve”, Artress partnered with three local doctors. Tanzania has only one doctor for every 25 000 patients, and medical education—to say nothing of postgraduate training or continuing medical education—is prohibitively expensive (about US$6000 per year). “The heartbreak of medicine in Africa”, he says, is a shortage of equipment and plenty of preventable diseases.

FAME's goal is to construct several facilities, including a clinic and a hospital, in a phased project that will have education as its backbone. “We realize that one doctor, treating one patient at a time, is only a drop in the bucket in view of the massive needs here.” Still, Artress says, his work in Tanzania “is tremendously rewarding, and can be lots of fun—all you need is a spirit of adventure, flexibility, and patience. Not ‘patients’, though—we've got lots of those!”

"Finger Pointing" -- by Meredith Bowen

I have led a discussion and educational session in my parish, dealing with the MDGs, every Sunday during Lent. Last Sunday, someone asked whether or not we, as the global community, would reach the goals by 2015? I took a deep breath, referred the group to some of the handouts and simply said, “No, we won’t meet them all.” I went on to add that we will meet many of the target goals – in certain locations – and that not meeting all of the targets by 2015 doesn’t mean that we won’t meet them all and exceed them in our life-time.

One gentleman shot up his hand, obviously exasperated, and said, “Who is to blame for not meeting these goals? Who is being held accountable?” Many others in the room began shaking their heads in agreement, wanting desperately to point the finger in order to ease their frustration.

Some wanted to blame our current American administration – I quickly pointed out that President Bush has done more for Africa than other president in history; that more people are on ARV drugs now than ever before. Some wanted to blame the international community, the United Nations, for not spending wisely – an “us versus them” approach. Some wanted to blame non-profits – a quick and easy way to convince oneself not to donate.

I asked how many people in the room – a group of about 30 people – could name all 8 of the MDGs from memory? A few hands went up. I asked how many people in the room could have named all 8 MDG’s back in 2001 after they had been created and the work began to achieve them? Silence. I asked the gentleman how much he could accomplish if no one knew what he was talking about – if no one had any personal interest at stake in actually achieving whatever it is that he had set out to do.

It is the same with the MDGs. Finger pointing won’t end extreme poverty. “We” can always do things better, faster, more efficiently. But until we take personal responsibility for the way in which the MDGs are achieved, how can we expect them to miraculously happen?

Meredith Bowen is a law student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She spent the fall semester in Arusha, Tanzania doing an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Meredith has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. She started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.

"Start Small and Stay Committed" -- by Meredith Bowen

A couple of weeks ago I was watching the 11 o’clock news here in Ohio. There was a huge breaking news story about a group of horses discovered in a field south of Cleveland. The horses had been abandoned, and were starving in the snow. It was a terrible sight. There was an instant out-pouring of money (thousands of dollars), donations of food and shelter, medical care and permanent homes for these abandoned horses. People were outraged that this had happened.

Don’t misunderstand me, I am an animal lover through and through. I don’t want animals to suffer. I have been to the pound one too many times myself and brought home yet another dog in need of a loving home. So please don’t misconstrue my frustration for a lack of concern for horses in need. But please! When was the last time the current situation in the Sudan made it onto my 11 o’clock news? Or the plight of children in sub-Saharan Africa – where a child is orphaned by AIDS every 14 seconds?

What if a news crew stumbled upon a field in Ohio filled with starving PEOPLE? What would be the response? Why can’t we have as much empathy for people starving in the third-world as we do for horses starving in our own backyards? Why does having an ocean separating those who have from those who have not alleviate our responsibility to do something about it? Where is the outpouring of cash and concern for people who don’t have anything to eat?

Why are these horse’s lives worth more than those of human beings struggling each and every day to feed their children enough to live another day?

I don’t think that anyone would argue that the horse’s lives are worth more. But our actions speak much louder than our words.

I do appreciate the MDGs but I am finding it increasingly hard to get people to feel passionately about them. Maybe we are approaching this the wrong way. Perhaps a top-down approach is too overwhelming – too much for people to bite off and chew along with the complications of their own lives. Perhaps, if each parish, each family, each person became active and impassioned about ONE project or ONE child or ONE area of the world it would be a way to get the ball rolling.

One field of horses was just enough to get people interested and involved – enough to help people feel connected and empowered to make a difference. During this time of Lent, perhaps we should each take on something instead of giving something up. Stay committed to a project each and everyday despite temptations to stray from the goal. A dollar a day, five dollars a day. One less meal out each week. These small contributions over the course of Lent could add up to a lot for a child in need, a family in need, a village in need.

Start small and stay committed. Get larger in scope and dedication only after a period of success. Don’t let the MDGs overwhelm you or those around you into inaction.

Meredith Bowen is a law student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She spent last fall in Arusha, Tanzania doing an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Meredith has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. Started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.

"Re-entry" -- by Meredith Bowen

I arrived home to Ohio about three weeks ago - after seven months in Tanzania. I was ready to come home. It had been a long trip and I was exhausted. I had done the whole re-entry thing many times before - so I thought I was prepared for the culture shock that awaited me. Months of living and working in an area where homes made of mud are the standard can make returning to the U.S. a difficult process.

Amsterdam airport is always the first of many overwhelming experiences. Followed by Detroit. Suddenly the population shifts and my white skin makes me a part of the majority and yet I feel out of place.

Returning to my family is always a joy. Which is good since for the first week or so I tried not to leave my house in order to avoid the consumerism that typically is the hardest part of returning home. The mall, the grocery store, the traffic of expensive cars that fill the streets. Coming home right before Christmas might have been my biggest mistake - the commercials on TV, the long lines, the piles of presents adding up to more than what your average Tanzanian makes in wages over the course of an entire year. How could we possibly shop for one more thing?

Christmas Eve came and I headed off to church with my family. It was dark and cold, the church was beautiful. The service was lovely as always. But as I sat there, trying to celebrate the birth of Jesus I couldn't shake the sadness I felt. I started to cry. I couldn't stop, Legitimately, I would get it together and then there it was again. This ache I felt. Guilt that I sat here warm and secure - celebrating - while a billion people were neither warm nor secure. Missing the kids from the Children's Village. I had to get up and leave.

It had only taken a couple of days on a couple of airplanes to bring me back to this side of the globe and yet, sitting there amidst such abundance it was so apparent that the two are worlds apart.

There is much to be done "there" in places where there is a need for food, medicine, schools, etc. But there is also so much to be done right here in terms of bridging the gap between our lives and the lives of a billion people who live on a dollar a day. We need to build it into our consciousness so that it affects each day and each decision we make.

The sadness passed. I returned in time to hear the story of night that Jesus was born. It was no coincidence that there was no room for Mary and Joseph that night at the inn. I pray that we can all make room in our lives for those in need.

Meredith Bowen is a law student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She spent last fall in Arusha, Tanzania doing an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Meredith has volunteered in Tanzania with the Rift Valley Childrens Village (an orphanage) as well as with the Anglican Diocese of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Diocese of Tanga. Started the African Orphan Education Fund to award scholarships for secondary school and university.