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by Gary Selnow
Ten years ago, at the beginning of this new century, WiRED International became a registered non-profit organization. In the past decade, our path has twisted and turned across 12 countries on 4 continents. But we have always stayed true to course on several key matters:
- One, targeting people in desperate need.
- Two, using technology to up-date medical professionals and teach grassroots communities about health.
- Three, supporting our belief that people can help themselves if you give them a hand.
Looking at isolated, impoverished and often war-ravaged people, WiRED has a simple credo: Where you live should not decide if you live.
To illustrate that credo and the technology behind it, in the next several minutes, I would like to pass on a few stories about the people, the doctors and the events that tell you a bit about WiRED. First, a prelude to the birth of WiRED.
Back in 1997, I was a Fulbright professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia as the Balkan’s war was grinding down.
Out of nowhere, the U.S. Embassy asked me to take a train to Vukovar—a war-ravaged town sitting on the eastern edge of Croatia. Why go to Vukovar? To give teachers a lecture about the Internet. That’s fine, but when I got there, I found out they didn’t have the Internet. Further they knew next to nothing about the technology, and worst of all, Vukovar was in shambles.
Well, our Embassy knew there was a problem but a lecture was no solution. So, I took the next train back to Zagreb, shook down USAID for $7,000, and shanghaied two university computer students. We bought three train tickets back to Vukovar and started work that three-years later would turn into WiRED. Our first assignment was a ramshackle, mortar pocked, high school where we hooked up a dozen UNICEF computers found in a storeroom, and got them online through a 56K modem—an old telephone dial-up that you might recall.
We watched in amazement as the kids, who knew only war and its isolation, looked into a world they had never seen. They saw a place where people of different races and religions could live together, and where you could walk down the street without fearing a mortar strike or a sniper’s bullet.
Exhausted after finishing our work late one night, the computer techs and I drove a van 25 miles to the nearest town with a standing hotel. The road was empty and dark, and up ahead we saw a glow on the horizon. We could hear small explosions, and every once in a while, we would feel the road shake.
Crews were burning anti-personnel and anti-tank mines from farm fields—the first of three steps to clear the area of land mines. Sadly, even after the fires, the heavy equipment and the step-by-step inspections, the children and farmers stumble on the last few mines that escape detection.
Even though on paper the war had ended, it continued through these nights for the people who lived in eastern Croatia. And as we drove through the fires on either side of the road, I thought about people locked in their homes listening to the explosions and about the kids who that day found a link to the world outside. That was the moment I knew we needed to expand this idea.
Over the next three years, we laid the foundation for WiRED. We set up computers, Internet connections, and ran video conferences in the Balkans—in Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and eventually Serbia.
A turning point came in 1999 here in Kosovo as we helped set up Internet centers for a State Department project.
We noticed that a large number of Internet users were doctors. Why? Because, they told us, they had no other information source for the latest medical developments. Like most everyone in the former Yugoslavia, they were isolated by war from the world at large. The internet for them was a gold mine.
Within six months, we shifted our focus to connecting doctors and grassroots communities with the latest medical and health information. That has been WiRED’s focus ever since.
Let me tell you my favorite story about connections.
I was traveling through Kosovo with a nurse and a five-year-old boy in a small van, run by the International Organization for Migration.
We were on our way to the Skope, Macedonia airport. I asked the nurse what was wrong with the child, and showing me his blue finger nails, she said he had a hole in his heart. “The doctors in Paris,” she said, “will fix it for him.”
“So you’re taking him to Paris?” I asked.
“No, I’ll put him on the plane and someone will pick him up at the Charles de Gaulle airport.”
“How about his parents or someone who speaks Albanian going with him?”
“No money for them,” she said.
“So, this child will fly to Paris, have open heart surgery, and no one who speaks his language will be there to hold his hand and assure him that all will be well?”
“That’s how it goes,” she said. In war zones, it’s a phrase you hear a lot: “That’s how it goes.”
Well, we couldn’t do anything for this young boy, but we did set up a program called Video Visit. It’s simple. You link computers in the home country—where the family is—to a hospital, where the children are being treated. And then you train hospital staff how to run a video linkup. Today, video connections are commonplace. In 1999, in that part of the world, a video conference was space-age technology.
Here, you see a link-up between parents in Kosovo and their child at a pediatric oncology hospital in Pisa, Italy. In one of our teleconferences, a mother held a baby up to the camera to show her older son his new sister. That might have been the first time a brother and a sister were introduced online.
The lesson we took away is simple: Use technology creatively for medical connections anywhere—to link people in need with people who can help.
By the time we expanded into Africa, WiRED was a full-fledged, if modestly funded, non-profit organization.
We began work in Kenya, exploring how we could use technology to teach grassroots communities about AIDS prevention. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” never made more sense than it does with HIV/AIDS.
Working closely with community leaders and doctors, we developed a program that uses engaging computer tools to teach AIDS prevention.
We quickly expanded the program to cover all health-related issues and opened more than 20 Community Health Information Centers—pardon the acronym, CHICs—across Kenya. During the past few years we have reached more than a million Kenyans with AIDS prevention and health information and taught more than 100,000 young people basic computer skills.
We put some of our computers on bicycle taxi’s—called boda-bodas—and rode them into the countryside to teach healthcare in remote villages.
Some of our CHICs operate completely on solar. We offer special programs for teachers, soldiers, sex workers, truck drivers. Some facilities operate in the most punishing slums the world has ever known.
Each person who comes to our CHICs has a story.
Some centers draw regular visitors, like one 12-year old girl who dressed up every morning in her best—and only—dress, and studied every training program in our library—many times. She wanted to become a doctor and she saw this as a way to start.
We wondered how our information would sit with Traditional Healers and Birth Attendants, who hold considerable influence in rural communities. They could have seen us as a threat and shut us down. Instead, they embraced the program and became our most powerful allies. They study at the centers twice a week and share the information they learn about HIV/AIDS and healthcare.
During a staff training week in Nairobi, a young man in his mid-20s, who was HIV-positive and showing signs of AIDS, approached me during a coffee break. He was a shy kid, and I knew that whatever he had to tell me wasn’t easy for him. Out of earshot, he quietly told me that if his community had had a CHIC program when he was a teenager, and I quote: “I would be alive today.” Hauntingly, he already saw himself as dead. Two years later, in fact, he did die.
Today, the clock is ticking on an army of young people. God willing, drugs will save those already infected. But our mission in Kenya and elsewhere is prevention...getting to the sexually active before the virus strikes. It’s a race between the lessons dispensed through our programs and the ignorance about this illness.
After all the bad news from Iraq, let me tell you briefly about a success. In early spring, 2003, I went to Baghdad with two people, one from the State Department—Jim Mollen, who, very sadly, a year later was shot to death in Baghdad.
On that first of 17-trips, I met two remarkable people who today are on WiRED’s board: Steve Browning and George Guszcza. Steve was Senior Advisor and Acting Minister for six major ministries for the Coalition Provisional Authority. George, at the time, was an Army Captain and Director of Health Infrastructure Programs for more than a thousand medical facilities around the country.
The first thing we discovered was that Saddam Hussein had cut his doctors off from all outside medical information. We never learned the reason, but for twenty years, physicians and medical students knew little about new drugs, treatments, research and procedures.
Asked to fill that vacuum, WiRED was in a position to move quickly and economically. We had a volunteer staff of two—and three local technicians, also volunteers. Typical of all our work, we got things accomplished by collaborating with local people.
With no way to import equipment, I asked around Baghdad if anyone would sell me some computers. An Iraqi business man asked, “how many.” I said “First batch, 36.” ”You got it,” he said. You see, not long before American troops moved into Baghdad, he had hidden his computer inventory in a barn guarded by a few guys with shotguns. Later I bought 100 more from him, and he remains a friend to this day.
The result? In less than six weeks, we set up a half-dozen Medical Information Centers, called MICs, in and around Baghdad. They were empty rooms in the hospitals where we wired together a computer network. We then stocked entire medical E-libraries. In no time, teams of physicians had access to countless books and studies. Where possible, we installed Internet capability. Soon there were telemedicine connections between US and Iraqi hospitals.
Later, we also provided teleconferencing facilities through which we coordinated medical lectures and discussions and case consultations.
To tell you the truth, in the early days of Iraq, we were able to do a lot for medical education with very few resources. Or as Dr Kahlid Mayah, director of Basra Teaching Hospital said of our MICS, “this may be he best thing done for Iraq...for the health system all over...your effort to make Iraqi doctors enter to the world of scientific research and information was the best thing done.”
We didn’t only work on a bargain basement budget, but we traveled on one as well.
Usually, our computer technician and I hitch-hiked on military aircraft or entered and departed the country in cars we arranged. At one point, the Iraqi doctors had me travel in an ambulance because it was safer than a car. On one trip from Baghdad to Amman in a rented van, Dr. Miriam Othman, an Iraqi physician, and I broke down outside Fallujah. As luck would have it, an American convoy riding down the road across from us was attacked by insurgents, and we looked on as an awful firefight broke out. It’s a story we like to tell, but not now.
I can say that after the Falujah incident—and years of work on WiRED’s projects in Iraq and now in the United States, Dr. Miriam Othman has impressed me enormously. She is incredibly smart and dedicated and compassionate for her work on public health. And so, I am happy to announce to you, that today, Dr. Othman has joined WiRED’s board of directors.
While we’re making important announcements, I want to tell you how pleased I am to say that Allison Kozicharow has also joined WiRED’s board today. Over the years, Allison has put an enormous amount of time and talent into WiRED’s projects. She has helped us with the Website, brochures, fund-raising, strategic planning and many other matters that allow us to fulfill our mission and function as an organization. She knows WiRED very well and will make a wonderful addition to our board. Many of you in this room know Allison; please join me in welcoming her.
Well, while we’re discussing good news, let me mention the Berkeley Award.
WiRED was honored last year to receive the Organizational Public Health Hero Award from the Berkeley School of Public Health (watch a video of the award). This recognition from one of the country’s leading universities is a testament to the work that can be accomplished by a group of volunteers who recognize a problem and set out to fix it.
Attending the banquet at which we received this award was one of WiRED’s best friends and supporters: Dr. Charlotte Ferretti, Director of the Edelman Institute at San Francisco State University. Charlotte has been an enormous help to us over the years; I am grateful for everything she has done to support our work. I see Charlotte in the audience, and I would like to ask her to stand.
Where does WiRED go next? We have several items on the agenda—two stand out: 1) expanding health education tools and programs in developing communities, and 2) educating people about clean water—why you need it and how you get it. Quick explanations:
Six months ago, we set out to create a new library of interactive training programs for grassroots communities. Commercially available programs now cost tens of thousands of dollars—some much more than that—and we just don’t have the budget. In fact, neither do most other NGOs working in developing countries. That means health education would come to an end for the neediest people.
We decided to do something about this awful situation. We pulled together a team of physicians, medical editors, technicians and others, and we’re building our own interactive teaching tools. We have 49 training courses in the field now and are working on an additional 70 topics. Furthermore, we decided to make the entire collection available, without cost, to any non-profit organization working with resource-constrained populations—overseas and in the United States. Health information saves lives. How could we NOT make this available to people who need it? Moreover, how could we charge them for it?
 On to our second focus, as many of you know, over a billion people have no access to clean water and nearly two million die each year from water related illnesses. Other NGOs are working on the problem, but the issue weighs so heavily on global health, that we have decided to bring our special training skills and resources to the issue. We have developed an educational program to teach the construction of BioSand filters—constructed from materials available locally. Further, we will have courses on other water purification techniques and on Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT)—an approach to rehydration that some have called a miracle.
With us today is a WiRED board member, who is one of the developers of ORT. I’d like to ask Dr. Robert Northrup to stand. Dr. Northrup will write an ORT training program that we’ll make available through our facilities and release to other NGOs worldwide.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the decade of Wired. It has been our good fortune to enjoy:
- A supportive and committed board whose members have gallantly shaped our policy and practices.
- A battery of generous supporters who value our mission to the desperately poor.
- An army of volunteers—writers, designers, technicians, doctors and just plain folks like you and me.
Everyone in this group—board, supporters, volunteers—give freely to help people they will likely never know. What a remarkable testament to the compassion of the human spirit.
It reminds me of 42 simple words written more than two centuries ago. They speak to the WiRED challenge:
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
At all the places you can,
In all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.
Thank you.
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