Blog #11: Ali, Ferry, Finney

In the previous blog, we announced we have chosen 15 recipients for the AllPeopleBeHappy Volunteer Service Award. In this and the next 4 blogs, we are introducing the 15 awardees. Sundal Ali is a member of George Washington University’s GlobeMed team and will be team coordinator this summer in Kampala, Uganda, working with the Ugandan NGO Set Her Free to prevent sexual exploitation of young girls trapped in Kampala’s slums. Eileen Ferry is a member of Northeastern University’s chapter of GlobeMed, which has been working with the Ugandan partner Kitovu Mobile, an AIDS organization, for 4 years. Together these organizations have created and implemented a Hygiene and Sanitation program in 75 villages. Eileen is part of a team that is returning to Masaka, Uganda to evaluate and expand this project. Kristen Finney, a sophomore at MIT, will be volunteering in Kara, Togo with an organization called Hope for Health. She will be part of a team working with five HIV/AIDS clinics on electronic medical record keeping. Community Health Workers’ hand-written reports collected in the field often do not become part of the patients’ clinic records as the clinics do not have the staff to input the data. Kristen and her team will be field testing and fine tuning an application they developed for Android phones to collect data and then export it directly into the clinics’ electronic records.