Four medical students made a collection from their classmates to a women’s hospital they visited during their studies as a thanks for the staff’s hospitality.
“Via friend to friend, you get a whole new level of trust”, says organizer Joel Westholm.
Just a couple of semesters away from finishing their medical degrees, four students led the way in an project intended to help students in Lund give back to Uganda by helping expecting women in the heart of East Africa. The two year project is currently drawing to a close during which as many as 400 kits have been delivered to a hospital in Mbarara.
Near the close of their 12-semester long medical degrees, students Helena Hertzberg, Mimmi Karlsson, Joel Westholm, and Hanna Tufvesson traveled last year to Uganda for a class on Global Health in the town of Mbarara.
The women’s hospital they were visiting was operating under excruciating circumstances. At the time, “it felt like we arrived empty-handed to a place in such need,” according to Helena Hertzberg.
Upon coming home, these four students decided to do something. “We were very well-received at the time and felt that the Ugandans gave us so much of their time that we wanted to give something back.” More specifically, they wanted to give something back that came directly from the students at Lund University.
“All four of us [agreed] that the easiest way to spread news is through Facebook, so we got in touch with our Ugandan peers at the Mbarara hospital and made an event called ‘Insamling till Sjukhuset i Mbarara’,” explains Hertzberg. In turn, student by student, donation by donation, the foursome finally pulled together a total of 20 000 SEK.
“Facebook helped make it easy for us. Via friend to friend, you get a whole new level of trust, and that is how you get all of those folks who are sitting at home just thinking about what they could do. After the Facebook upstart, people started emailing each other and the news spread with much ferocity,” says Joel Westholm.
The call to action worked and now the project is almost reaching its close with just one delivery left for this fall. Hertzberg, Karlsson, Westholm, and Tufvesson have all finished their degrees. However, Hertzberg concludes that she would certainly like to continue to work with this project. “I intend to continue to work with this on a larger scale.”
