San Ramon is covered in dust. It blows in with the wind and can clog a person's lungs. It is a permanent landmark in the colonia neighborhood inside the city of San Quentin, Mexico. San Diego State students and faculty who spent last weekend there wore hoods and sunglasses to shield themselves from dirt.
There were no complaints from the group who went there to provide humanitarian work and plan to go back in two months, Noe Crespo, an SDSU doctoral student, said.
San Ramon is a community with migrant workers who pick strawberries and cactus crops. The homes are plasterboard houses with minimal sanitation. Poverty is rampant. The population is indigenous and "largely ignored by health services from the Mexican government," Crespo said.
Twenty SDSU students traveled to San Ramon mainly to stress proper family planning. The trip was made possible by the Fred H. Bixby Foundation, which donated $589,000 to SDSU's Graduate School of Public Health. The donation enables SDSU students and faculty to continue humanitarian efforts in San Ramon for the next five years.
The public health project is a joint mission with approximately 140 people from SDSU, the Universidad de Baja California, the University of California San Diego and Rotary clubs from San Diego and other parts of California.
The community's dire situation was first identified by VIIDAI (an international health program for students), which used the first donation to field a survey. The family planning outreach was initiated after the survey found that the age for one-third of all first-time pregnancies was 16.
Teaching family planning is a house-to-house mission for the SDSU students consulting with young mothers. The average family size is five to 12 children, which is a problem for families who may not be able to financially support all the children.
To underscore this message, a group of fourth- and sixth-grade students were given an intensive three-hour course in family planning along with a commitment to educate their peers. Public health professor Stephanie Brodine said it was a necessary step.
"It was critical that we work with those at this young age, since on average, these women are having children in their early teenage years," Brodine said, according to an SDSU press release.
With two trips a year, the SDSU-supported public health programs at San Ramon are works in progress. Other projects include securing safe drinking water and fighting poor nutrition and anemia. A new kitchen was built in the elementary school to serve as operations base for the project.
The mission has its own rewards, project manager Lucy Cunningham said.
"We have medical students who take a break and go out and play soccer with kids," Cunningham said. "We (have) piles of donated toys and we set up one whole classroom on the last day as kind of a toy store and the kids get to pick a toy.
"The kids are beaming because they never get anything new."
3 comments:
I hope you've taken what we talked about yesterday into deep consideration.
Great story man, like always. Good job. Keep doing great work like this and you might become the features editor at SDSU. lol.
Hey I didn't know that Kathryn had a blog.
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