Carolyn Wallin and Veronica Ades have never met, but both women recently took the same innovative action to save lives in Africa: They personally delivered donated laptops and WiRED Community Health Information (CHI) e-libraries to medical professionals in developing regions of Tanzania and Uganda.

Remember the time you had strep throat as a kid? How much your throat hurt, how you had to go to the doctor and take medicine for over a week and stay home from school until you were better? That was no fun, to be sure, but if that’s what happened to you when you caught strep throat as a child, you can consider yourself very fortunate. In the United States, strep throat is treated, and that’s the end of the story.

WiRED International’s Honorary Board is an interdisciplinary group of extraordinary individuals who are committed to our mission of sharing critical medical information with impoverished communities worldwide.

WiRED’s next stop along the Amazon headwaters is Santa Maria de Nieva, Peru, where we will continue the work begun in the region last November. Santa Maria de Nieva is a small village, literally at the end of a road that wends through the jungles of northern Peru.

WiRED believes that community health starts with knowledge—and there is no better proof of this than the launch of WiRED’s Community Health Information Center (CHIC) Certificate Program in Kisumu, Kenya.

The success of WiRED International’s second trip to the isolated Peruvian village of Galilea rests solidly on our team of 14 volunteer translators. These men and women translated 25 of WiRED’s Community Health Information (CHI) program modules into Spanish, a task that took several months of dedicated, unpaid work.

After nearly two weeks on the road, WiRED’s installation team has returned from work in the Amazon headwaters where it provided a range of health education resources for the small village of Galilea, located in a remote jungle region of northern Peru.

One child is dying from dehydration. Someone gives the child badly needed water. The child’s body cannot absorb the water and the child dies. Another dehydrated child is given water mixed with a simple formula of sugar and salt. This, the child’s body can absorb, and the child lives.

WiRED just took a giant step towards ramping up its Community Health Information (CHI) Center programs in South America with a new project in Peru. WiRED Director Gary Selnow, Ph.D. recently returned from visiting the small village of Galilea, deep in the Amazon jungle.

In a separate event from the latest e-library installation, WiRED dedicated the Faye F. and Sheldon S. Cohen Community Health Information Center (CHIC) in Pandipieri, Kenya, a community services facility where WiRED has operated for the last 10 years bringing health information to more than a quarter of a million people.