Last week 25 Tufts students and five doctors from Connecticut braved the bad weather and traveled to the Dominican Republic on a medical service trip. The trip was organized through The Timmy Foundation, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to undertaking health projects in low-income countries.
The group members treated residents of several poor villages in Puerto Plata, a Northwestern province of the Dominican Republic. While some of the recipients of the medical care were Dominican, the majority were Haitian immigrants. "We served the poorest villages in the area, and these villages are mostly Haitian," junior and Donations Chair of the Tufts Timmy Foundation Club Justin Oldfield said.
Students diagnosed and treated a number of minor medical ailments, ranging from worms to vaginal infections. Through a series of different clinics, they offered both over-the-counter and prescription medicines to the villagers.
Many Dominican landowners encourage Haitians to leave their native country and work for them with the promise of a better life. "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere - there have been so many tragedies there due to political corruption and ruthless leaders," junior Jordan Thomas said.
Thomas, who served as a liaison between the doctors and volunteers, said that many of the Haitians are exploited by the landowners and end up living in quasi-slavery.
Sophomore and Tufts Timmy Foundation Club President Tahnee Sidhu said that the volunteers provided helpful services on their trip.
"At first I felt like we were just putting a Band-Aid on their problems, but we actually are helping them," she said. "Even if we prevent just one person from getting pneumonia, and in turn they are able to continue working and earning money and putting food on the table, we are helping."
This was her second trip to the Dominican Republic, so she was able to draw on her experience from her first visit last year to make her volunteering more effective.
"My first trip last year was an eye-opener - everything was new. This year I could be more analytical. I could see where things had changed and what still needed to be modified," she said.
One specific issue that the group focused on is whether it is possible to create the foundations of sustainable care on short trips. On the trip to the Dominican Republic, the volunteers read an article provided by The Timmy Foundation's international headquarters that focused on the effectiveness of short-term service missions.
"I was really glad we addressed this issue. Afterwards, a lot of us admitted that it was something we had been concerned about," sophomore and student volunteer Leah Reitz said. "Eventually we came to a group consensus that we may have benefited from the trip more than the people we were treating, but that this was not necessarily a bad thing."
Reitz said that she felt especially positive about this trip because volunteers "weren't doing something that the villagers could have easily done."
"We provided medical care, a resource which many of them don't have," she said.
Oldfield agreed. "The point of our trip was to [learn about] the disparities in global health care so we can go on and do more in our futures. While there is an issue of sustainability, and there are certainly still problems we were unable to address, we made at least a small impact and that's good," he said.
Still, the impact could have been bigger if not for inclement weather. "In a sense, everything that could have gone wrong with the weather went wrong," junior and Tufts Timmy Foundation Club Treasurer Trent Worrell said.
The group's initial flight was cancelled, and after spending the night in an Atlanta airport, the volunteers finally got a direct flight to Puerto Plata. "It rained the whole time we were down there. A lot of people got sick and one person was injured," he said.
Still, he said that the group's morale remained intact. "Everyone was so positive. We became incredibly close in such a short period of time," he said.
As a result of this bond, the 25 volunteers did not disband upon their return to the United States. This Saturday, many of them will participate in the Fourth Annual Urban Walk for Haiti in Cambridge, which is sponsored by Partners in Health, an organization that aims to improve health care in Haiti, Latin America and the United States.
Members will also take part in a charity dodgeball tournament this weekend. Sponsored by Tufts' No Homers Club, it will raise money for the Tufts Timmy Foundation Club.
