Cause for Celebration
Dear Friends of Etta Projects,
We are excited to share with you that we are about to launch a Continuing Education Fund for our Community Health Promoters! We will begin on Etta’s birthday, January 25th, and will call it the Etta Fund, a celebration of, and investment in, the tremendous skill and commitment of Community Health Promoters (CHPs).
During the prolonged isolation of rural Bolivian villages during the pandemic, our CHP program graduates were resourceful in using a combination of generations-old indigenous medicinal plant treatments along with basic western medications they received in their “Health Kits” during training.
Since then, they have shared with us many stories of how it was a combination of these two methods that enabled them to treat fellow villagers in regions without the support of hospitals, doctors, or even medicine supply replenishment. We are eager to carry their knowledge forward and build on it!
Our continuing education classes will be led by a well-respected Bolivian doctor who is trained in the use of both methods. He will teach 12 day-long workshops over a period of six months, to 25 Community Health Promoters at our Tekoatí campus. The entire cost of each workshop will be $250, for a total of $3,000 for the entire series. This will cover the classes, transportation, food, and medicinal plant ‘starts’ to take back to their villages from our on-campus medicinal plant garden. This new series of workshops will build upon last year’s very successful Medicinal Plant Education class series, offering it to CHPs from additional regions. An important feature of these classes is peer information sharing of traditional herbal medicine healing practices by the participants. To view a 1-minute video of one of last year’s classes, please click here.
As our Etta Fund grows, we also envision expanding our CHP continuing education workshops to focus on more areas of public health, in response to the increasing needs which our doctor on staff, Caterine, has learned about during her field visits to participating communities. To view a 1-minute video of a CHP serving her rural community, click here.
Listening and evolving is part of our ongoing commitment to being responsive to the expressed needs of the communities we serve. They are adapting to a changing landscape -- influenced by many outside forces -- with resilience and courage, and Etta Projects couldn’t support them without you!
Thank you for playing your part! To donate, click here. And thank you to Etta on her 38th birthday; we heartily celebrate her and the torch she lit…now a brightly burning bonfire!
Gratefully,
Catherine Willis Cleveland
Executive Director, Etta Projects