In 1985, one Sunday morning, Dr. Wes Jones, a Fayetteville N.C. physician, was handed a brochure about a health project in Montero, Bolivia that was being run by a Raleigh-based global non-profit called Impact Global Health Alliance Global. Despite not having much information, instantly he felt what he remembered to be “a huge surge of energy like sticking your finger into an electrical outlet.” Jones knew immediately that the Lord was calling him to Bolivia, but for him, it just didn’t make sense. The project was about women and children who had little or no access to prenatal and preventative health care. Jones didn’t speak Spanish, he was a gastroenterology specialist and he’d never been to South America. God must be mistaken, Jones thought, this just didn’t make sense.
Jones soon learned that Bolivia was among the most impoverished nations in the Western hemisphere. Montero was a forgotten community where most families did not just know death, they lived it every day. Incredibly, and as is true among many developing nations, he learned that every fifth child was dead by age 5.
It would take two more years before Jones finally surrendered to the call to go. Stepping out of the airplane on that November morning in 1987, Jones was overwhelmed by the heat and high humidity. It was 92 degrees at 6 a.m. and he had no air conditioning. The heat and ripe mangoes falling on the tin roof overhead made sleep almost impossible. Walking by a schoolyard to the hospital each day was unforgettable. There was no grass, only dirt. A barbed wire fence surrounded the school. Most of the school windows were broken or missing entirely.
The noise from the buzzing motorcycles and the odor from the raw sewage at times were over powering. Women and children would sit on street corners for hours trying to sell a few sticks of chewing gum or a few oranges. Dr. Jorge Patsy, a Bolivian nephrology doctor, would say over and over: “Nobody has no money, nobody has no nothing.” During that trip, when Jones called home, all he could do was cry on the phone, so touched by the poverty. “On that first trip, the Lord stripped away everything to teach me how little I needed to be happy,” Jones remembered.
When Jones returned to Bolivia in 1988, he was now a member of Impact Global Health Alliance Global’s board. He traveled to Bolivia this time, not just as a short-term medical missionary, but also to learn about Impact Global Health Alliance. It was during this trip Jones would learn more about the non-profit’s CBIO methodology (Community-Based Impact-Oriented), the backbone of Impact Global Health Alliance.
The methodology is an approach to health care service that allows local health care providers to better understand, more effectively treat, and accurately measure outcomes and impacts for the most commonly found causes of unnecessary suffering, sickness and death within communities. Some of the key steps that Impact Global Health Alliance takes includes establishing a relationship with the community, identifying the most frequent, serious and preventable diseases the community encounters and focusing efforts on the highest priority health problems.
After witnessing and learning more about the CBIO approach, Jones realized why it was so necessary for global change, “Everyone counts, and everyone is counted.” The approach encouraged ownership by the communities involved in the Impact Global Health Alliance project. It also “built social capital”, as the data collected by the health workers is shared with the communities.
The CBIO methodology also involves using verbal autopsies, a World Health Organization sanctioned, series of questions, which allows health care professionals to accurately determine the most probable cause of death. Through this method, Jones learned that on the Altiplano, a 14,000-foot broad, plain bordering the Andes mountains of Bolivia, one-half of the infants died of respiratory infections. Given this observation, the health project pushed antibiotics aggressively with major reductions in infant mortality. In contrast, in the lowlands of Montero, one-half of the children were dying of malnutrition, parasitic infections and gastroenteritis. Improving water quality thus became a major priority, once again with significant success.
Since 2008, at the Montero project, infant mortality has been less than 10 % of the national average; and since 2002 with more than 2,000 deliveries, there have been zero maternal deaths. This success has been replicated at other Impact Global Health Alliance projects including the highlands of Guatemala, in an area once known as the “Triangle of Death”, because maternal and infant mortality were so high.
For more than three decades, this approach to community health, which Impact Global Health Alliance has championed, was viewed as prohibitively expensive. World health projects instead were vertical, focusing on individual diseases such as malaria, polio, small pox and so on. The problem is that not all communities have malaria, polio or small pox. Communities were often forced to expend scarce resources/manpower to address non-existent illnesses. This must have been demoralizing for the communities and why many health projects were not sustainable.
CBIO has changed this. By executing this method, health care workers go door to door providing health care and giving simple, lifesaving education, such as the importance of hand hygiene, breast feeding, vaccinations and sanitation. Women’s care groups also greatly multiply a health care worker’s outreach causing health expenditures to fall dramatically, and in the $28 per family annually.
Today, community health, which Impact Global Health Alliance has championed, is now also embraced as national programs in Bolivia, Brazil, India, Kenya and South Africa.
This past August, Jones, marked his 24th trip to Bolivia. He accompanied other leaders to Impact Global Health Alliance Global’s project sites. The team introduced the work to its new partner, CCATE (Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Education), a nonprofit near Philadelphia that will begin implementing CBIO methodology in January 2019, as well as Dr. Joseph Cacioppo, Chair of Community and Global Health at the Jerry M Wallace School of Osteopathic Medicine, Campbell University.
The leaders visited program sites across the country and learned about the challenges the communities still face, and the successes they’ve celebrated. They visited homes and saw the local health workers in action, and how everyday lives are being saved and unnecessary suffering is being prevented. Jones and the group witnessed that when health workers were returning from the field, their work was far from over. They worked with the data they had gathered from these communities and ensured their maps and census were up to date.
Thirty-three years have passed since Jones’ first encounter with Impact Global Health Alliance Global and it has had a lasting effect on Jones’ life and faith. He is now the founder and senior partner of the Cape Fear Center for Digestive Diseases, in Fayetteville. He received the distinctions of being a Fellow of the American College of Physicians (FACP) and American Gastroenterological Association Fellow (AGAF), and he authored Cure Constipation Now, A Doctor’s Fiber Therapy to Cleanse and Heal. He has also now twice been a member of Impact Global Health Alliance Global’s board of directors, his board membership now spanning more than 20 years. He has also visited other project sites in Guatemala, Liberia and Haiti.
It’s his trust in God that Dr. Jones believes has led him to all these accomplishments. When Dr. Jones describes God’s first call for him to go to Bolivia, he compares it to the story of Jonah in the Bible, when God called him to go to Ninevah, but he didn’t want to. During his first trip to Bolivia, Dr. Jones says, “I went with great fear and trembling, because I did not trust God. He literally used a club as he did with Jonah. And what a trip it has been ever since.”
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