Visions and Voices, a newly established program at USC, seeks to motivate students, administrators, professors, Trojan families and members of the community to get more involved in the arts, world affairs, and many other topics that may pertain to their interests or career fields.
This time, ONE@USC decided to attend this event in hopes of learning more about projects and opportunities the school can offer to get more involved with stopping the spread of preventable diseases in Africa.
For this event, USC Trustee Dave Dornsife and his wife Dana put together a presentation for attendees on their initiative to provide programs which will facilitate the transportation and drilling of clean water, providing–through their extensive and admirable efforts–the ability for thousands of impoverished families in countries like Niger, Ghana, Mali and Ethiopia to prevent diseases that often arise as a result of unsanitary water and lack of hygiene. Mr. and Mrs. Dornsife gave us a bit of insight into their program and described some of the background which preceeds their work:
The struggle for survival is incredibly difficult in many African countries. The Sahara Desert is expanding, and the average life span of residents ranges from 46 to 48 years. In 2006, Mali and Niger were in the bottom three of the 177 countries ranked in the United Nations Human Development Index. A major contribution to this difficult existence is the lack of clean drinking water. Additionally, two serious illnesses arise because of the lack of clean water: trachoma, a bacterial infection that eventually results in blindness, and guinea worm, a water-born parasite that causes debilitation and pain.
During the presentation, the couple addressed these illnesses with vivid photographs to describe them, causing some discomfort in the audience but definitely sinking in some very real truths. They showed us some photographs of a girl’s operation for the removal of the guinea worm that had been slowly growing in her leg, feeding from her own energy to strengthen its own system. The next slide showed a woman who had chlymadia, traditionally an STD but if left untreated and unwashed, can develop on the eyelid and eventually cause blindness by turning the eyelashes inward so they scratch the cornea.
I apologize for the graphic nature of the entry, but it seems that we can only shock people into doing the right thing if they
a) get informed
and
b) are shown the harsh reality of the situation.
The most astounding part of the presentation was the following:
Diseases such as chlymadia could be prevented with two simple spoonfulls of water distributed across the eyelids. That’s all these people need to prevent these horrible, diseases that torture and mark their lives of water. Two spoonfulls of clean water.
