New Project for the 2012-2013 Year:

GlobeMed at Dartmouth has accomplished a lot this past term! Thank you to Angela Gauthier ’13 and Nikki Sachdeva ’15 for leading us into our second year! We’re all set for a new project, which involves funding a laboratory for the Ja Reng Yang Clinic to test for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB. Crowded living conditions, insufficient food and nutrition, lack of clean water, and poor sanitation and hygiene are causing increased rates of illness among Internally Displaced Persons, especially among children and the elderly. KWAT has set up a clinic to treat people suffering from illnesses resulting from these poor living circumstances, but they do not yet have a laboratory that can identify common infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB. The clinic will be better equipped to care for patients with these diseases once these people have been identified.  It is also necessary for health care providers to know if their patients have these infectious diseases so they can protect themselves. Our goal was to raise $6,000 for our partner’s project, but our very successful campaigns will allow us to send even more!

Campaigns Recap:

GlobeMed at Dartmouth had great success with campaigns this term! Thank you to Leigh Ann Humphries ’13 and Katelyn Wong ’15 for organizing these events! Due to popular demand, we continued our beloved Crepes campaign biweekly; pumpkin crepes were a real crowd-pleaser! In addition, we revisited our Halloween Delivery campaign from last year. Delicious Halloween-themed cupcakes and pies were special ordered and delivered to our fellow students by dedicated GlobeMed members. Amidst baking and delivering our scrumptious treats as a means for fundraising, we planned and hosted our 2nd Annual Benefit Dinner in order to spread awareness of our cause. Benefit for Burma: Health as an Agent of Social Change featured two renowned campus a cappella groups and keynote speaker Dr. Kathleen Allden. Dr. Allden of Geisel School of Medicine has lived and worked in Burma through Burma Border Projects, and she delivered a telling account of her travels and medical and social work in the region. Thanks to the help and support of our wonderful Dartmouth GlobeMedders, we met our first fundraising goal with flying colors! Our fall term campaigns brought us  $1,253.46 for our partner, and we’re looking forward to new, exciting campaigns for the upcoming winter term!

Individual Giving Updates:

We are extremely pleased and humbled to report we successfully completed the Global Giving Open challenge, raising $5,210 from  57 unique donors in a month! Thank you Andy Zureick ’13 for leading this very successful campaign! Thank you to all of our members, donors, and friends of GlobeMed at Dartmouth. Here’s to a wonderful winter term!

ghU Highlights:

Our ghU coordinators, Zuo Ming Koh ’15 and Aditi Misra ’14, have dazzled our members each and every meeting with jeopardy-style quizzes and presentations about our partner KWAT, Burma, and Thailand. Ming and Aditi have mastered the fusion of global health information and community building, for all of our members gather in groups to tackle the questions Ming and Aditi throw in our direction. It’s all good fun, and we come away learning more than we could have imagined. A favorite ghU presentation centered on the holiday season, seeing as we were about to part for winter break. Ming and Aditi went over the holidays we hold near and dear in our country before enlightening us with descriptions and videos of our partner’s celebrations. We stared in awe at  videos of beautifully decorated hot air balloons being released into the night sky during the Burmese Hot Air Balloon Festival known as Tazaungdaing Festival. It is so heartwarming to revel in celebration together with our partner. ’Tis the season!

Community Building Highlights:

GlobeMed at Dartmouth is fortunate to kick-off its second year with a strong contingent of new members. Our new members largely hail from the freshman class, the Class of 2016, and it has been a wonderful journey getting to know each and every one of them. Each staff meeting, we engage in community building exercises to forge relationships, uncover passions, and spice up our work with play. Thank you Heather Szilagyi ’15 for leading these activities! One of our most memorable community building activities was a public health simulation. During our very first info session this term, we collectively demonstrated the unbelievable rate at which disease can spread. The activity is a handshake game that goes a little something like this: all members close their eyes, and two students are randomly selected as “vectors.” These “vectors” are “infected” and will spread disease every time they shake hands with and introduce themselves to an uninfected individual. To transmit the infection, the vector will tickle the inside of his/her victim’s hand as the vector shakes his/her victim’s hand. The victim then continues to pass on the disease by tickling the inside of a new victim’s hand.The activity continues for approximately ten minutes. When time is called, all victims are asked to raise their hands. It is astounding how quickly the disease spreads and dominates the entire body of students. We love interactive community building!

GROW Team Selected!

Our GROW team for next summer has been selected! Thank you to our GROW Coordinator, Nina Boal ’14, for organizing all of this! Congratulations to Harrison Han ’16, Kristina Mani ’16, Tendai Masangomai ’15, Neelima Panth ’14, and Adam Kraus ’14! The group is looking forward to visiting KWAT at Chiang Mai again and hopefully seeing the clinic that we are funding this year. The trip will take place in August once again, for approximately 3 weeks. More details coming soon!

E-board Evolution:

Thank you so much to all of our Fall 2012 E-board members for helping to make this term great! Ayesha Dholakia ’15 managed our email account well and kept us all updated with her minutes. Neelima Panth ’14 kept excellent track of our finances. Erin Becks designed awesome posters to advertise our events. We will miss you three so much next term! We also would like to welcome our new E-board members for the winter term! Julie Ivy ’15 will take on Internal Communications, Harrison Han ’16 will be our External Communications Officer, Sumayya Younus ’15 will head Finances, and Shay Vellanki ’16 will be our new Historian. Looking forward to a productive next term!

And of course, a big thank you to our supportive GlobeMed staff members! Thank you everyone for making this past term a huge success!