To all those at The Highlands,

We wish to extend you our warmest thanks for kindly hosting us on your campus. We always enjoy the opportunity to share our stories and we hope that we were able to challenge and inspire. Together we can continue achieving worthy things.

Please take a minute to explore our website. You will find information on our projects, links to related publications, opportunities for creative giving, and archived stories and pictures from Matt's experience.

If you would like to contact Matt (the medical student who spoke with you) directly, please feel free to email him at mateo.malek@gmail.com.

Thanks again, and welcome to San Jose Partners!

-The SJP Team

A medical student learns about healing while he works on the basic needs of water, nutrition and education for the people of San José

Since July 2008, third-year medical student Matthew Malek, 25, has spent his year-out in the rural village of San José, a community of approximately 300 households situated in the rugged western mountains of Honduras. Electricity services only 6 percent of the houses, and about 80 percent of the houses lack piped water. Nobody has a flush toilet; about half don’t even have a latrine. Getting to the nearest Internet connection requires a walk of from one to three hours. Matt has been living alone in the adobe community building in San José, working in the dual capacity of researcher and community health volunteer.

Full Article

Please check out the latest work going on in San Jose:

http://sanjosepartners.org/whatwedo/tripreports/

An interesting article on community health care workers in India.
Original article: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/12/community-doctors/rosenberg-text

Medical Migration patters image and text available here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/12/community-doctors/follow-up-text


Thank you for the article Dr. Campbell.

Download Latest Issue (article on page 22): here

As many of you know, Matt Malek has been in San Jose for nearly 7 months now. For the past 10 days, his girlfriend, Kirsten Nagel, came to visit and volunteer!

An excerpt from Matt's blog about her trip:
Prior to coming to San Jose, Kirsten translated “The Penguin Song” into Spanish, with the hope of teaching it to kids at the various San Jose schools. “The Penguin Song” is a camp-type song about how to walk like a penguin, i.e. right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, move the head, turn in circles. It’s VERY catchy, and when sung and danced by two gringos, VERY entertaining.

So, we set up a visit to the San Jose Centro school and the Portillon school, and showed up to each with a whole program of education and fun.

We would start by reading a children’s book, Kirsten in Spanish and I in English. We were pleasantly surprised to find that ALL the kids, from Kindergarten through 6th grade, were absolutely entranced by this. After, we donated the books to the schools for the kids to read themselves.

Read more about their adventures in San Jose here, The Legend Comes to Town: http://www.sanjosepartners.org/whatwedo/mattsblog/

Announcing...

Gifts of Health: The San Jose Partners Alternative Gift Shop

Want to improve a life with a birthday present?
Looking for the perfect gift for someone who has everything?

Look no further!

Gifts of Health provides you with the avenue to give, in the name of the recipient, a health-sustaining, life-saving intervention. In San Jose, Honduras, the people suffer from easily preventable diseases due to a lack of clean water, clean air and adequate sanitation. By choosing to “give” one of our many simple interventions as a present, you give the gift of health to a family in San Jose. What better gift is there?

Click here to browse GIFTS OF HEALTH!

Promoting Community Health in Honduras (link to .pdf)
by Douglas Stockman M.D. Director and Barbara Gawinski , Assistant Director Global and Refugee Health

The Department of Family Medicine at the University of Rochester continues to operate a year round Global Health Program which offers didactic training throughout the year and travels twice a year for two weeks at a time to rural Honduras. The Department has partnered with an NGO called Shoulder to Shoulder and a rural community called San Jose San Marcos de la Sierra in the Southwestern state of Intibucá, Honduras. The needs of the target community are great and go beyond curative medicine. By listening to the concerns of the local community members and performing qualitative community assessment, we are creating interventions designed to address the common problems. Below are highlights of our May 2008 trip.

The largest concerns of the village people continue to be water projects and latrines. The irst two ferro-cement water tanks we built are doing well. A third tank was started while we were there. This tank will provide water for the volunteer, Matthew Malek – a UR med student, who will start living in San Jose in July. Villagers from La Calera and Portillon, who were bene iting from piped water projects, were required to help with this tank’s construction. In addition to helping the project move forward faster, Portillon members learned about the speci ics of ferro-cement tank construction. The Portillon people will be building a ferro-cement tank as part of their piped water project.

During our November 2007 trip we helped La Calera begin a piped water project. They had completed the irst half of the project and had installed pipe from the water source to a distribution tank. During this trip we helped them purchase the additional 2+ miles of tubing needed to install a faucet at every household. When we arrived they had already hand-dug all the trenches required for the project. Within 12 hours of the pipes being delivered to San Jose Centro where the road ends, the pipe was being carried on villagers’ shoulders for the 2+ hour walk down the treacherous mountain-side to La Calera. Given each person was carrying 27 pipes that were 20 feet long and each bundle weighed over 60 lbs, it was quite a feat of human endurance.

We built our irst Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) latrine this trip in San Jose. The VIP latrine has a chimney which helps remove some of the foul smells from inside the latrine. The initial latrine was made for the volunteer house. We were able to train a local person, Apolinar, on construction techniques. He will run this project with DFM providing the materials that must be obtained outside the area such as cement and PVC pipe for the chimney and each home must providing all the labor and local materials. Six months ago, teachers from the school asked for some assistance in creating teaching kits in science and math. Representing the First Unitarian Church’s Honduras Project Committee – Teacher Resource Committee, Moritz Wagner and Barbara Gawinski, along with the team members from the Department of Family Medicine, personally delivered over 50 pounds of school supplies to the classrooms, three teacher science/math curriculum kits, and 250 books and resource books to four of the ive schools in the San Jose region: San Jose Centro, Portillon, Potreros, Guanacaste. Scholarship programs are also being started in the area.

We are always impressed by how much we can accomplish in two weeks when dedicated hard working people pool their collective energies and skills. There was a great synergy between this group and the many hard- working Hondurans. We are building a very strong relationship with the Hondurans that is already yielding many fruits. Our Global Health Program is maturing nicely and expanding to include The First Unitarian Church has provided new resources to the Hondurans through teacher education and potential for student scholarships. Thanks to everyone who has made this program a success.