Patricia Pruden's Hospital in ME

[StClone]

Where did Laura Bush (or whomever in the WH) get the idea for a hospital in Iraq? She (they) may have copied a Canadian. Patricia Pruden's success started with a lot of nothing but hope and drive that in the end prevailed. Now, BushCo wants a hospital. It's not a bad idea but the WH effort looks to be a lot less viable and more political than Pruden's heart feel results.


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Pruden is a children's chemotherapy nurse, a job tough enough in any country. But what she saw in Egypt shocked her. It was overwhelming – the numbers of kids and families.

When she first arrived she worked in the cramped quarters of Egypt's National Cancer Institute, the place where Egypt's sickest and poorest end up.

more at...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/world/cairo.html

[iverglas]

1. ah yes, Cdn medical workers leaving Cda in droves ;)

And not all of them going to the US.

Maybe somebody besides Laura will pay attention -- to how development is really fostered in the developing world.

From the story:

"We wanted to go beyond what anyone said we could do," she says. She recalls that almost everyone said to forget about it. "They just said Sherif Abul Nega is crazy and now there is this foreign Canadian woman who is also crazy."

Dr. Sherif Abul Nega was the man who first recruited her to come to Egypt, the man who relies on her to help complete the vision of a hospital, funded entirely by donations, caring for every child in need.

"Sometimes you get an impression about a whole country when you see a person," he says. "How Canadians are kind people, not fighters. They are kindhearted. They are open to the world. This is now our impression about the Canadians. <Pat is> very important, she is an ambassador."

I quote that last bit not to say, or prove, that Canadians are the most wonderful people in the world -- but to show how doing the right thing, the right way, can make people like you instead of hating you.

Development is a complex process, and the agents of development within a society form a very complex web; finding one's own place in it, as outsiders, can be difficult. In this excellent example, the effort was indigenous -- it originated with Egyptians, and has been facilitated by a foreigner with the skills to contribute that were missing. It is one tiny achievement in everything that needs to be done in Egypt, but its ripple effects can't help but be huge -- in terms of both improving people's lives and enhancing the society's openness, to new ideas whatever their source.

Development really is a process, and not a state of being. It is something people and societies do, not something that happens to them or is done to them. Facilitating a society's own development, rather than imposing structures or rules on it, is most likely to benefit both "them" and "us".

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