2014
Trip Members: (L) Janae Anderson, John Dobleman, Ryan Houghton, Lauren Nicola, Gary Nissen, & Erin Patrick Murray
(R) Nhu-Nguyen Le, Jocelyn We, Bryn Wilson, Karen Dionesotes, Holly Bacon, & Carl Tunink
In May, our Project CURA team will be traveling to Ghana, where we will spend five weeks volunteering with local organizations that provide medical care and public health education to the community. We will spend two weeks of the trip working with Dr. Jean Young, an American physician and director of the Saboba Medical Centre. This rural clinic services a population of over 120,000 people in the Northeastern part of the country near the Togo border. In Saboba, we will work with locally trained medical providers, assisting and observing various areas of medicine including acute care, surgery, OB/GYN, and pediatrics. The remainder of our time spent in Ghana will include service work with local NGOs. We plan to engage in outreach work involving tutoring and educating others on topics such as basic hygiene techniques, typhoid fever and malaria prevention, and sexual health. In addition, our group will have the opportunity to experience the rich cultural highlights of Ghana, including Mole National Park and the Cape Coast Castle.
Trip Members: Matt Kiblinger, Mary Funke, Lindsay Robinson, Molly Hiatt, Ali Brandeis, & Andy Pham
The Guatemala trip plans to work with two main organizations. First, La Mision in Guatemala City, which is run by Dr. Tito, a local physician. They provide medical and dental care, as well as educational opportunities and construction aid, to the rural areas outside of the city. Next, our group will travel to Quetzaltenango, a city in Northwestern Guatemala, and work with an organization called Salud y Paz. This nonprofit offers many of the same services as La Mision, but serves an even larger area with many clinics all throughout the mountainous region.
The major purpose of our trip is to learn about global healthcare through both observation and patient care, while maintaining the scope of first year medical students. Therefore at times, the best we may be able to do could be sharing a conversation or listening to a patient’s story. But even more than that, we ultimately hope to learn about and live out the spirit of service emphasized at Creighton in whatever way asked of us.
Trip Members: (L) Robert Schroell, Annie Do, Michael Ulen, Gabrielle Welch, & Tom Kang
(R) Katie Lester, Nick Peters, Lauren Niegisch, Pat O'Connor, Michael Heinz, Kate Hellie, & Daniel Dyer
We have two groups traveling to India this summer. The first group will be flying into New Delhi and will travel to Pune, where they will spend the majority of their time working at a clinic set up by the Desai family. From there, they will travel to Calcutta to spend a few days at the Mother Teresa House, then to Siliguri to work with the Jesuits in the area. The second group will head to northeast rural India for over a month. They will spend the first half of the tip assisting rural clinics. The second half of the trip will be spent in Kolkata to work at the Mother Teresa House.
Trip Members: Megan Barlow, Mitch Kohl, Katy Kroger, Eric Nippoldt, Shelby Reiter, Luke Webster, Ashley Weeratunga, & Julie Windholz
This summer, Project CURA Romania will continue to work closely with two Romanian organizations that CURA has held long-standing relationships with: Veritas and Deb's House Orphanage.
Project CURA Romania will fly into Budapest, Hungary on May 22, 2014. From there we will travel by train to Sighisoara in the heart of Transylvania, to work with Veritas and the Tigmandru clinic, servicing the roma population. We will work with individual clinics targeted to the elderly, mothers & babies, and teens, performing blood pressure and glucose screenings, and teaching basic principles of hygiene and health. From there, we will trek through the Carpathian Mountains to the town of Botosani where Deb's House orphanage is located. We will spend the majority of our stay here, working with a clinical group to provide basic healthcare services to the children, helping out with odd jobs and projects around the orphanage, and continuing to foster Creighton's relationship with the children of Deb's House.
Finally, we will end our trip in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, where we are working to establish a new Creighton relationship with the Jesuit Refugee Services, helping to provide basic healthcare for their refugees. Our team is incredibly excited to carry on the work that years of Creighton medical students before us have put into developing these relationships, as well as establish new medical volunteering relationships for years of Creighton medical students to come.
Trip Members: Susan Cook, Eddie Maldonado, Laura Quennoz, & Peter Heng
This summer, Project CURA Southeast Asia will be heading to Vietnam and Cambodia to volunteer in underserved populations. We will be working in clinical and community-based settings, partnering with local non-profit organizations. In Cambodia, we will be working specifically with Solaid International, based in Kampot, Cambodia. We all hope this experience will make us more aware of the health concerns and issues on a global scale, while immersing ourselves in the culture of the region. Ultimately, we expect this to be a fulfilling and rigorous experience.
