Beyond traditional borders

By Matt McKee     8/28/08 7:00pm

Summer in the United States means winter in Lesotho, and into this winter, Rice University students brought the warmth of aid and ideas. Beyond Traditional Borders, an organization founded at Rice in 2007, awarded internships to 17 students and sent them abroad this summer to develop and carry out missions for sustainable growth in developing countries. Of these, 13 students went to Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho, a small country surrounded entirely by South Africa. To participate in this eight-week program, students carried out projects they developed over the spring semester and found their own initiatives within their community to pursue. Project subject matter varied from bioengineering advances and health education to economic analysis and entrepreneurial training.

For many, this experience tested creativity and independence. Students were left on their own to work at their jobs and find their own ideas to bring into fruition.

"I was really nervous," Martel College senior Jenna Hook said. "It was so funny, because they kind of just dropped us off, and we kind of had to find our own way."

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The students were not literally abandoned, as Beyond Traditional Borders Director Yvette Mirabal helped them settle in at the beginning of the eight weeks. They also had consistent jobs and contacts to anchor their brief stay in the poverty-stricken country while they found projects to work on. Hook said she liked the independent nature of the program.

"I wouldn't change it," she said. "It's really good to have it that way. It teaches you how to find your way around a third-world country, and it teaches you that you gotta communicate with people."

Hook lived in an apartment with five other Rice students for the duration of the program. She and her partner, Will Rice College sophomore Christine Bohne, worked as interns at a local clinic, the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative Center for Excellence. Hook and Bohne also visited regional clinics to view HIV/AIDS diagnosis and treatment in a country where over 25 percent of the population lives with the deadly disease.

Hook's personal project involved field testing a solar-powered backpack containing instruments to diagnose patients for the HIV virus. With the power unit and testing supplies, the backpack weighs around 40 pounds. Hook worked on the backpack as an engineering design project and took a model with her to Lesotho.

"We were taken to a really remote mountaintop clinic," Hook said. "We showed the backpack to them, and they were really excited about it. We left it with them, and they're going to continue to provide us feedback about it."

Staff at this clinic often hike to rural villages to diagnose and treat HIV/ AIDS patients, as many of the ill citizens cannot reach the clinics themselves. The clinic's doctors were very excited about the backpack Hook brought them.

"One of the doctors told me, 'It's like you took everything I needed on my outreach trips and put it in a backpack,'" Hook said.

Hook said she is waiting for testing results to see if her design is working. She said one backpack could potentially diagnose over 1,000 people.

Bohne's individual project was tailored to help the staff of the CoE clinic and government-sponsored health facilities determine patient adherence to anti-retroviral drugs, which help prolong the HIV stage of the AIDs virus. She said many methods used by the Lesotho hospitals leave much room for error, and she worked with health care staff to use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and special weight systems to make sure doctors gave out the correct amount of medicine with less tedium.

"They would measure syrups and pills by hand," Bohne said. "Now all they have to do is place the bottle on the scale, enter a couple numbers in the spreadsheet and distribute the medicine."

Working as partners, Bohne and Hook also had to find a project from their work in the Lesotho clinics. They discovered that volunteer translators in clinics are often patients and community members who help doctors communicate while receiving little or no payment, Bohne said. The pair prepared a grant proposal that would increase funding for the much-needed translators.

"Our job was to determine the impact [of the translators] on the clinics," Bohne said. "They can't afford to feed their families, but they keep on coming because they think it's so important. We interviewed translators and got their stories, and hopefully they'll get funded in the future."

Other BTB interns focused on sustainable water and energy practices, while some focused on education to support sustainable growth. Baker College sophomore Mina Fitzpatrick carried out a health education course for young men and women that included HIV/AIDS prevention and safe sex practices.

Will Rice College sophomore Josh Ozer and his partner, Neha Kamat (Will Rice w'08), designed and carried out a four-week course for Lesotho high school students on the possibilities and practices of business and entrepreneurship. For roughly five hours a day, they taught about 30 students at Masianokeng High School concepts such as record-keeping, risk-taking and investment.

The curriculum Ozer and Kamat created included lectures and hands-on activities. Ozer said for one activity, they took students out to interview people about how normal people would use flashlights. The students took from that the basic principles and a sense of the importance of market research, Ozer said. Ozer and Kamat then gave the students flashlights to sell and generate seed capital for businesses they started in a school marketplace.

Ozer said he continues to hear from students about the success of their business ventures.

"About 23 percent of the people in Lesotho are unemployed," Ozer said. "About 29 percent of the people in Lesotho live in extreme poverty ... What's uncommon is starting your own business. It's sort of not part of the culture there. People don't like to take the risk, and understandably so. It's difficult to put money down and put everything on the line."

Like Hook, Ozer said he appreciated the opportunity to independently learn about the community.

"What I felt like I got most out of this trip was how to work with other organizations and how to go out and find other organizations to work with," Ozer said. "In our first four weeks without teaching, we took in on ourselves to go out into the community, and ask what was wrong and how we could help."

Putting that into practice, Ozer said he was able to meet public officials and see other aid organizations in action by going out and initiating contact with new people.

"It's amazing what someone can accomplish when they see the world without limits," Mirabal said. "We want to help capture that creative energy."

Mirabal said the BTB's summer programs supplement its initiatives on the Rice campus, which include lectures and the establishment of the Global Health Technology minor. Hook, Bohne and Ozer said these efforts are helping Rice students see the importance of global health and sustainable development.

Many participants in the BTB's summer programs (including those outside Lesotho) contributed to a collective blog, which can be found at owlsbeyondborders.rice.edu.

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