Periclean Scholars from Elon University have traveled around the world to work on their projects — from Zambia to Ghana, Mexico, Namibia and Honduras. For the latest trip, students visited rural villages in India.
Eleven students and two professors from the Periclean class of 2012 traveled to India at the start of their summers to begin a partnership with a non-profit organization in rural Maharashtra that focuses on community-based primary health care.
Comprehensive Rural Health Project, the NGO the students worked with during their two- to five-week stay in the country, began in 1970 and focuses on bringing education and health care to the villages in rural Maharashtra.
After partnering with the organization early in the spring semester, the Pericleans organized the trip as a way to establish projects with CRHP that they can work on throughout the next two years.
The projects the students worked on while they were there included assessing the programs at the organization, creating an outline of work flow at CRHP, working with adolescent girls at the CRHP campus, brainstorming fundraising ideas for the organization and shooting a documentary about the organization.
CRHP works to improve not only the health of villagers, but also strives to educate, to improve the role of women and to break the stigma of the caste system.
The organization has various programs focusing on these goals. The Village Health Workers program brings women to the CRHP campus, where they learn about everything from delivering a baby to treating depression. They, in turn, act as primary care doctors in their villages. There’s also an adolescent girls program, which educates young girls from the villages about reproductive health and income generation opportunities.
While the students were visiting India, they were able to travel around Maharashtra to visit a few of the more than 175 villages that CRHP works with. Part of the purpose of the trip was to really get a feel for what the organization does, so the students were able to see first-hand what they would be supporting by partnering with CRHP.
Over the next two years, the class of 2012 will be developing their projects and returning to CRHP to implement them.
– Submitted by Jack Dodson ’12