Every morning, 12-year-old Kevin rises promptly with the sun to do her chores before going to school. She sweeps around the hut she shares with her sisters, gathers water from the nearby source, and washes the previous night’s dishes. After putting on her uniform, she walks to school, where she joins her friends and resumes her studies. Her favorite class, she says, is English.

This is where she and her classmates encounter International Medical Outreach when the team is on the ground in Papoga, Uganda. In Kevin’s community, IMO’s intestinal parasite prevention and treatment program aims to improve the health of these students – through medication, health education, access to clean water and shoes, and improved sanitation.

Life in Papoga is beautiful, albeit laborious and demanding. The perspective we gain from students like Kevin shows us first of all that we live utterly different lives. We appreciate that difference and, therefore, seek only a way in which our program will fit into the unique life of the community.

This week’s video is for an inspiring organization called Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons, which will be an exhibitor at M3!

PAACS is a rural-based surgical educational initiative utilizing rural mission hospitals in multiple countries. PAACS seeks to train national physicians at relatively low cost, schooling them in modern surgical thought as applied to resource-poor environments with the intent of having high rates of retention of the its trainees within Africa. PAACS is a nondenominational, multinational, volunteer service organization striving to serve the poor of Africa, to build capacity within the healthcare sector, and to help maintain the faith-based healthcare facilities that have traditionally provided a significant percentage of the healthcare.

There have been a total of 37 general surgery graduates and 6 pediatric surgeons from the program working in various parts of Africa or are fellows in the pediatric surgical program.