Foundation Corner January 15, 2015
Posted by Kristin Lambert
Foundation News - January 2016
January is Vocational Service Month
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The impact of an HIV/AIDS vocational training project in Liberia can be assessed by the ultimate measure: life itself. “There are children of HIV mothers living today who would not have seen their first birthdays [without the training],” says Elizabeth Mulbah, a member of the Rotary Club of Sinkor, Montserrado County, Monrovia, who delivered a lecture for health care providers about HIV/AIDS during the vocational training team’s five-day workshop in 2012.
The goal of the team -- comprised of individuals from the Los Altos Rotary AIDS Project in California, USA; the Rotary Club of Sinkor; St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital in Monrovia; Global Strategies for HIV Prevention, and the Center for HIV Information at the University of California, San Francisco -- was to increase maternal HIV/AIDS services and to improve the quality of care in Liberian clinics. Nearly 60 health care workers in Montserrado and neighboring Bomi counties learned techniques to prevent mother-child transmission of HIV and to improve their ability to diagnose and treat infected women. They also were taught how to pass along the information to other health care workers.
Now, a Rotary Foundation global grant is facilitating an expansion of the project to other parts of Liberia.