Year 25+

The film project "A Year in the Life: Healing Africa" has just been awarded a grant for educational outreach from Harvard University's Office of the Provost. This is a grant to help develop educational content, and will be used to edit video segments from the film for online and classroom teaching. This material will be piloted at two Harvard Medical School first year classes, 'Patient-Doctor I', which introduces interview techniques and basic patient/doctor skills, as well as 'Introduction to Social Medicine', which is meant to introduce cross-cultural concepts as well as issues involving disparities in health care. The documentary footage should serve as a powerful teaching method in both classes, with the immediacy of film a way to bridge the great gaps in distance and social conditions that exist between the US and sub-Saharan Africa. This grant will ensure an educational audience for the film, and will hopefully act a springboard for further outreach.
This grant fits one of the underlying concepts of the film, namely, that improvement in health care in the developing world doesn't involve a one way street from the rich world to the poor. Rather, the developed world has much to learn from the developing world. The film will portray African agents of change in health care: that is, African doctors, nurses, and community health workers who are addressing crises like AIDS in their own unique ways. There has been a general shift in attitude in much of the public health world, which has gone from a top-down to a ground-up approach to problem solving. Preconceived notions and dogma can cause much harm, both to health care and development (and not to mention good documentary films that hope to achieve some truth and objectivity).