WiRED International is pleased to welcome Violet Grgich to the WiRED Governing Board. Tatjana Grgich, Violet’s mother, director of the Tatjana Grgich Family Foundation, served as WiRED’s first board member and continued to guide and support WiRED throughout her lifetime.
WiRED International is pleased to announce that WiRED’s recent Community Health Worker (CHW) Training Program in Peru was underwritten by Board member Anthony Hodge and his family in loving memory of Edie L. Hodge, his beloved wife, and mother of Dick, Jane and Kate.
WiRED International’s board of directors and volunteers are deeply saddened by the death of George Ochien’g Orlale on September 15, 2020. Mr. Orlale has been a member of the WiRED family for 17 years and lived in Kisumu, Kenya, one of the low-resource communities where WiRED serves.
WiRED International’s board of directors and volunteers are deeply saddened by the death of Tatjana Grgich, nee Cizmic, on September 2, 2020. She passed away peacefully at home with her family by her side. Mrs. Grgich served 30 years as president of the Tatjana Grgich Foundation, which assisted youth from Croatia and other conflict-torn areas of the world. She was also a founding member of WiRED.
WiRED International staff writers Olivia and Meghan Spirito sat down with their parents, Christopher and Jennifer, during a family dinner to discuss how COVID-19 is affecting their lives and to share their thoughts on volunteering for WiRED. The sisters came up with questions before dinner to ask each other and their parents. They recorded their answers during the dinner and then wrote the conversation down for this article.
When The World Health Organization declared 2020 “The Year of the Nurse and Midwife,” no one had any idea that nurses and other first responders would be front and center in the fight against COVID-19.
Healthcare workers expose themselves to the risk of the virus as they do what they are trained to do every time they begin a shift, which is care for those with disease, work in their communities on prevention through education, and care for those in community and home settings.
COVID-19, climate change, neglected tropical diseases, recently released health education modules and videos on our work, a new smartphone app — these are all topics of recent stories posted on WiRED International’s website.
Due to dramatic advances in transportation, a viral outbreak that began halfway around the world now assaults our entire country. It is sickening and killing even people in small towns like Odon, Indiana. That’s where my 91-year-old brother is confined to a small room in an assisted living facility. He’s recuperating from hip surgery and isolated to hopefully avoid contracting the deadly virus.
As governments around the world rightly focus on the growing COVID-19 outbreak, we need to be mindful of a variety of other existential threats that will not disappear with a cure or a vaccine. The most evident threat is climate change; throughout the next decades, it will severely impact every aspect of life, including human health. In this article, one of our young writers shares her passionate concern, and her words remind us that her generation faces huge challenges even after the COVID-19 issue resolves.
“The coronavirus has crushed healthcare systems around the world. And it’s especially cruel in the poorest regions, where there are fewer than one doctor for 20,000 people. In these places, officials are calling on community health workers to help the sick and teach people how to avoid contracting the virus…”
These opening words of WiRED International’s just released video go on to tell the story of WiRED’S Community Health Worker (CHW) Training Program. The program includes health communication, community health instruction, health surveillance and continuing education. This video showcases photos taken all over the world in the low-resource communities where WiRED has distributed its free health training material for almost 25 years.