If you look at things from a global level, you see malaria as a really daunting issue.
But if you attack it in small pieces, especially context where you can see your change--addressing
it at the village level you see the direct impact that you have.
I run a program called Stomping Out Malaria in Africa, which is a Peace Corps initiative
to bring focus to the work of all 3000 volunteers in Sub-Saharan Africa on the problem of malaria
prevention.
What I like about Stomping out Malaria in Africa is that you're taking lots of individual
successes, finding out what made the individual successes work, and then replicating them
in 20 different countries.
I think the one thing that is very unique about Peace Corps than any other organization
that's doing malaria prevention is that we work in the communities that we're serving
in.
And so volunteers have the opportunity to reach their targeted population at any time.
The goal of our bootcamp is to provide all of the volunteers and staff members who are
attending a broad and deep knowledge of malaria prevention.
Everything from bed nets through indoor residual spraying, home-based care...
and a good look at the science behind why we do those particular interventions.
One of the projects that I really like to highlight is actually happening here in Senegal.
we had a volunteer who looked at the problems of people not using their bed nets.
He went to his local health post and added up the dollar figure that all of these people
had spent on malaria medications over a year, and it was this astronomical figure.
He bought the same number of rice sacks that that money could buy--he bought the empty
ones--and he filled them with dead grass and he lined them on the street leading up to
the clinic.
So everyone that walked by saw this visual indication of just how much they were spending
on malaria prevention in a year.
And it made a huge difference in his community.
Now people want nets, they want to use them.
And I think that's a great example of what this training can do.
Malaria is a huge problem for mothers.
Mothers are much more susceptible to malaria than the rest of the general population.
We target maternal health because its an easy way to have a large impact, and because when
you're working with mothers, you're protecting the life of a child.
One of the biggest arguments in development is that you can't take one solution to a problem
and apply it to every community you're in.
What's great about the initiative is that we can harness the creative energy of 3000
volunteers across the continent and take their best ideas and then effectively implement
them in ways that are specific to each country we're in.
For example, if there are PCVs in Madagascar that are doing amazing things in malaria prevention,
we hop on Facebook, we talk about it, we hash out the details, and then we have them write
up a case study so that it is replicable in the countries across the initiative.
It also allows people back home to really see what's going on here.
So we can share with Americans who are back in the United States all this great information
about what we're doing, so it bridges this gap there used to be between the volunteers
who are isolated in country on their sites and their family and their friends, their
communities back home.
Every country is a part of a global community and when there are groups in that global community
that are suffering and unable to function well in their society because they are dying
from completely preventable diseases like malaria, it affects every country's ability
to function at its highest level.