6A the university daily kansan
doctors beyond borders
tuesday, april 13, 2004
DOCTORS: Students hold auctions to fund Outreach trip
Charese Donovan, Wichita second-year medical student, and Jen McAllaster, Lyons second-year medical student, taught two Belizean children how to brush their teeth. Health education was a goal of the program.
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Many of the women they treated wanted some form of birth control, such as condoms or birth control injections.
"After their 15th baby, they're dying to get on birth control," she said.
These birth control shots only last for three months, but the villages have nurses and midwives who offer them. However, the women have a limited supply, Jenab said.
jenni said.
The students informed several women that they were pregnant and also taught about the importance of a balanced diet
"We really didn't know what to expect when we got down there," Jenab said. "So the group decided to take whatever situation came through the door and handle it to the best of our ability."
But the group was not looking to help these villages for one week alone.
They want to foster a year-long KU Med clinic in Belize where the group would send future members and medical students looking for international residency work. The program is only under consideration right now, but Jenab said the student's medical adviser and several of the village leaders expressed immediate interest.
Fundraising
There are two things most students lack: time and money.
The medical students who make up the International Outreach Program have made the time to raise $15,000 through fundraisers and gathered almost $100,000 in donated supplies.
$160,000 in donated gifts
Some of the biggest fundraisers this year were auctions for the trip to Belize. The students held a silent auction with donated items such as Kansas men's basketball tickets and an autographed football from the Kansas City Chiefs' Eddie Kennison. But Jenab said the live auction, at which KU Med faculty and members of the group were auctioned off to do various jobs for the highest bidder, was more popular.
The students raised $2,500 from the two auctions. Jenab said the auction not only benefited the group's programs but helped the students feel more comfortable around their professors and other professionals.
"We're trying to pull everybody together and kind of break down
some of the invisible lines that don't get crossed a lot,"Jenab said.
A commitment in the group's bylaws appropriates the money. It has decided that the money earned from its first fundraiser of the year, an international luncheon, will go toward the first program it started: the Women of China.
Women of China
Jianjun Gao is a second-year medical student from a village in the greater Xinyi city area in China. He compares his village to the suburbs in the greater Kansas
City area. This area in China's Jingua province has a population of about 900,000 people, and they have about 15 schools that provide education to almost 3,000 villages, Gao said.
Villages, Gao said.
In China's countryside, the farmers would rather have a boy than a girl, Gao said. If they start having children and fail to have a boy, they will continue until one arrives, despite the government's recommendation to have only one child. As a result, he said many families consisted of one boy and several girls.
Gao said it was impossible for a family to send all of its children to school. It would cost a family with three children about 4,000 Chinese yen or $450 per year, he said. Most families in the country-side make about that much money in one year.
"A lot of families are forced to drop their daughters out of school, even though they are doing well, because the boy gets the first education," Gao said.
In Gao's family, his sister had to drop out of school and work on the farm in order for him to graduate from high school. So when Gao met Jenab, the group's founder, he informed her of this problem. Together, they developed the idea for the Women of China program.
The group set up a scholarship program and is now paying for seven girls' tuitions through high school at $150 per girl every year. This money covers the girls' entire schooling. Jenab said the group hoped to sponsor more in the future.
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