2016
Trip Members: Zach Meyer, Arianna Caruso, Kailynn Phillips, Alice Lin, Gregory Aird, Margaret Siu, & Mike Hagan
For our 2016 CURA trip to Guatemala, we will spend most of our time with 2 main organizations. Through a population with the local Mayan population, we will spend about 3 weeks working with the Pixan Ixim community in Southwestern Guatemala. For the last week of our trip, we will be partnering with a medical mission team to provide care to the small villages around Rio Dulce in Northern Guatemala. During this trip we will provide education on health care, observe medical practices and visit local villages to experience Mayan culture. In addition, we will be partnering with the First Sight organization to provide eyeglasses to those in need. We all look forwarding to learning a lot from this experience and working to fulfill the Creighton mission of service to others.
Trip Members (L): Sylwia Rychtarczyk, Emily Quick Bear, Matt Dummer, Ben Olsen, Michael Riley, & Robert Pedersen
(R): Nicholas Cabal, Kasey Llorente, Victoria Vardell Noble, Amber Williamson, & Grant Wintheiser
Our two teams to India will be journeying in mid-May of this year. We will be flying into Mumbai, and then will be taking a short train ride to our first CURA site, Pune. In Pune, the organization we will be working with is Tara Mobile Creches, a non-profit health camp set up for children of migrant construction workers. Tara Mobiles Creches' mission is "to ensure that migrant construction worker’s children enjoy the right to safety, healthcare, education, recreation and participation." After a week in Pune, we will be crossing the country to northeast India. While there, we'll be visiting many different sites, some healthcare related and others more culturally immersive. During our three weeks in the northeast, we'll be able to compare and contrast the care and culture of the rural northeast with the more urban city of Pune. As the semester rolls on, and summer grows closer, our time in India becomes less of an abstract vision and more a concrete plan. We can't wait for the adventures that await us
Trip Members: Rei Christian Salinas Calma, Megan Andrews, Alexander Hailey, Corey Homan, Rachel Thiets, & Ischel Kelso
During our four-week mission, our group will be traveling to Quillabamba and Villa El Salvador to volunteer in health clinics and community service organizations.Our journey begins in the countryside of Quillabamba, which is located in the Cusco region. Here we will be working with the clinic of Doctora Beatriz Nunez and serving local children. After two weeks, we will transition to Villa El Salvador, an urban district outside of Lima. In Villa El Salvador, we will work with the Wasives organization to serve the local community. As we embark on this journey, we are excited to further our healthcare experience in the context of a completely different culture. By doing so, we hope to gain perspective on how to best address disparities in our own community.
Trip Members: Patrick Isola, Nichole Adiletta, Haley Euting, Gibran Sofi, & Melissa Nguyen
This year, our Southeast Asia trip will be traveling to Vietnam and Cambodia. On our trip we hope to build relationships with the communities we will be staying with and work together with our communities in sharing talents to create a healthier world. We hope to engage in many different service opportunities with the idea that working with our communities we can created a shared sense of dignity and each learn and grow from our time together. The opportunity to travel abroad opens new doors to experience the ideas of another culture and we welcome the opportunity for this experience. We are delighted to continue Project CURA’s longstanding relationship with Solaid International in serving the community of Kampot in Cambodia. During our trip we hope to grow in understanding of the health concerns and issues other global communities face to gain new perspectives that we may carry forward in our medical careers. We are looking forward to the trip ahead!
Trip Members: Sean Purtell, Dan Adam, Daniel VanDerhoef, Ben Kor, Evan Daugherty, Weiting Tong, Kristen Keeley, Samantha Banks, & Sarah Birkholz
While at Pine Ridge, we’ll be spending four days working with elementary students and one day working with high school students. In the classroom we’ll run through a series of lesson plans that we devised ourselves covering a variety of topics. For example, our anatomy lesson discuss the basics of Bones, Muscles, Heart, and Lungs, while some of the other lessons we came up with talk about Diet, and Hygiene. When it’s all said and done, we’ll have run through the lesson plans a total of 24 times each so we look forward to working with a lot of students while we’re there. The kids we’ll be working with are ages 5 to 18. In addition to working in the schools, we’ll also be participating in a number of cultural activities that we know will round out our experience and give us even deeper insight into the lives and culture of the individuals on the reservation. These types of events range from bead making, to presentations on the history of the reservation, to attending drumming ceremonies. In all, we plan to give the students the most educationally enriching experience we possibly can but to also learn as much about the Lakota culture in the short time we’ll share with them.
We are most excited to share some of what we’ve learned in school to excite the students at Pine Ridge about their own education. We get two hours total with each grade level from two different elementary schools so our time is short. We’re not going to be moving mountains but what we’re really looking to do is just make this a fun and energizing experience for every kid we come into contact with so that maybe our passion for what we’re teaching them sparks a little curiosity in their own minds and gives them some motivation to pursue their own educational interests. In essence, that’s part of our goal for the trip, but in addition to that, we also want to communicate as best as possible to our friends on the reservation that it is an honor and a privilege for us to be able to work with them in this fashion, and that it means great deal to us that they take time out of their own class schedules to welcome us into their classrooms and share a week together. We want to leave the staff, teachers, students, and family members we’ll meet with a feeling in their hearts that as brief as our time there might be, that the med school is in full support of their community in any way possible.
