Students take active role in international outreach

Imagine sandy beaches, crystal clear waters, majestic mountains and green rolling hills — having the travel abroad experience of your life. Switch lenses to run-down buildings, crowded understaffed clinics, makeshift schools and muddied streets — making your travel abroad experience someone else's life.

In many cases, people in underdeveloped regions are faced with the challenges of inadequate food and shelter, no education, poor hygienic knowledge and lack of medical care every day.

One student organization at Texas A&M University is allowing students to use travel abroad experience to begin a change for the better in people's lives.

WorldMed is an international outreach focused organization that coordinates opportunities for students to go abroad through various types of mission trips to needy countries.

The trips are conducted through health or internationally related student organizations at A&M, reputable independent organizations outside of the University and doctors who perform medical outreach trips,

WorldMed brings together the opportunity in one place for students to find, apply and meet others interested in the same trips.

It began two years ago by students David Goodwin, senior chemical engineering major and former student Katy Britten as part of a project for a leadership class.

"What we did for our project is a global health conference Spring of 2008 where people came in and talked about the global health problems they had and we decided to form an organization from that so we could also send students on trips and do different projects to get them involved in," Britten said.

So far in its short history, participants have been on trips to Uganda, Peru, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Tobago, India and Vietnam. Programs added this year include Guatemala, Mexico, Jordan, India and Argentina.

The trips are chosen by WorldMed's International Outreach Coordinator Rika Mallepally. After polling the members to gauge where interest lies, Mallepally searches for outside organizations focusing on regions and service work.

Factors weighed in making the decision include personal student cost and having an overall goal as an organization to improve society.

"You will see a lot of organizations that will say pay $3,000 to stay in Mexico for a week and learn the culture, or donate x amount of money to this organization to buy food, and that is great but, WorldMed sees that as an immediate solution," Mallepally said. "We really like working with organizations that work to develop infrastructure so that these countries can sustain themselves in the future."

Mallepally's first trip with WorldMed was in 2009 as a freshman to Uganda, Africa with two other WorldMed members, where they worked in a medical clinic taking vitals and shadowing doctors in hospitals.

They extended their grasp to the villagers, teaching people about family planning, water safety and hygiene with presentations created during the previous semester.

As part of a similar Costa Rica trip, Brady and other WorldMed members stayed in homes with native Costa Rican families and traveled to a small village every day to work in a children's clinic.

On this mission, the volunteers worked in reception and the pharmacy, shadowed doctors in the exam room and helped paint a clinic. They presented health education curriculum to children at a soup kitchen focusing on safe food preparation, education about HIV and malaria and hygiene.

Although students can sign up and go on the trips individually, the benefits of going with WorldMed are numerous. Brady said one benefit was taking the confusing amount of paperwork out of the application process.

"There is a ton of paperwork to fill out, and we handle almost all of it, but if you were to do it by yourself it would be a lot more work," Brady said.

A semester before the trip students form relationships with attendees and develop projects to be implemented on the trips, such as the health curriculum.

Students who have taken trips said WorldMed made an impact —internationally, personally, Brady said.

"It's really easy to get focused on your life and your little problems that you have, but you go to these countries and you see that these people can't even count on having meals regularly, much less regular care and safe conditions," Brady said of the personal aspect. "It's just really eye-opening."

Mallepally said in countries where NGOs are prevalent the effect each individual trip has on global awareness as a whole is fractional. However, it's the effect it has on Texas A&M that is astounding.

"The fact that we are just one tiny university makes the impact on global awareness tiny, but it broadens what A&M does. It has a much larger impact at home," Mallepally said. "On campus, we have done a lot to raise awareness that we hope will motivate people in the future."

WorldMed has other opportunities to make an international impact other than going abroad.

"What we are trying to do is allow students to participate in global outreach through trips and from their dorm room at A&M," Mallepally said.

Students can develop health care awareness PowerPoint presentations and send cards to children in hospitals, Mallepally said.

The opportunities are open to all majors. The summer and winter trips include a wide variety of outreach, not excluded to the health or medical fields.

"If you are an education major, you can go work in orphanages and schools or if you are a business major, you can do micro-finance work in developing small business and loans," Mallepally said. "If you are an engineer there are a lot of medical tools and basic architectural tools that need to be designed in an environment where they don't already have everything."