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A few years ago, a boy in the Ghanian village of Barekuma fell so ill with malaria, his family assumed he would die. They took the child to a teaching hospital several miles away in Kumasi, Ghana's second-largest city, where he was treated by a doctor named Daniel Ansong, a partner in one of the University of Utah's international humanitarian endeavors.
In gratitude, village leaders asked how they could help the hospital. Ansong and others suggested expanding the U.'s presence into their rural area to promote development and disease prevention hand-in-hand with the locals. The community is now home to Barekuma Collaborative Community Development Project, which is becoming a model for self-sustaining humanitarian aid.
The U.'s participation is now sustained by funding from XanGo, the Lehi-based supplement maker.
Each summer, Utah students like Stephen Manortey and Erin Brown, doctoral candidates in public health, spend a few weeks in Barekuma and surrounding villages. A recent graduate with a master's degree in nutrition, Brown interviewed 100 mothers last month as part of a nutrition survey about diet and breast-feeding habits. It was her second trip to Barekuma and it won't be her last.
"The most incredible thing is the people are so welcoming and kind and eager to share information with us," said Brown, whose Ghana experiences were so pivotal she decided to pursue a doctorate in public health after completing her master's in nutrition.
Manortey, a Ghanian and doctoral candidate in public health, came to Utah five years ago to earn his master's in statistics at Brigham Young University and expects to return to Ghana to work in community health. His work entails building a census of the project's 20-village service area.
"It's a national problem. We don't have good demographic data on the country," Manortey said. He is training locals to do the census, which requires going door-to-door gathering fingerprints and basic information about every household, such as how many children live there, whether they have electricity, what type of toilet and ages of residents.
Although English is the nation's official language, Ghanians speak 47 indigenous languages. Manortey knows nine, including Ada, the one he grew up speaking, and Twi, the local tongue in the area where the U. works.
Last year, the collaborative built two schools in the village of Aninkroma. U. students helped write grants, the Ghanian government provided materials and technical expertise, and the locals did the construction.
"Things are getting built, but we're not building them," Alder said. The U.'s growing presence in Ghana, an equatorial nation in West Africa, once the resource-rich British colony known as Gold Coast, was pioneered by Utah physician DeVon Hale. He recruited Alder to lead the Barekuma effort.
"I was a young faculty member, the only one crazy enough to say yes. It's an overwhelming thing to take on such a project," said Alder, who has since been to Ghana 12 times.
The Barekuma project employs students from across the academic spectrum, from dance to engineering.
"Public health is a field of medicine where the community is the patient. It requires a strong multidisciplinary effort, so there is not a discipline at the university that doesn't have relevance," Alder said. The U. and other universities hope to replicate the Barekuma model in developing regions in other countries, such as China, India and South America.
"As an institution we have our missions: research, service and education. Where we are the best is when they come together. This is a model situation," Alder said. "We looked at how we could move a community forward in a way that they would not only become masters of their future, but also be a resource to others."
