Central to Public Health International’s mission is the need to share its knowledge of public and environmental health with as broad an audience as possible. PHI has seen the remarkably positive impact on villagers of the third world when they are the principle educators at an international conference, including mainstream international public health professionals.
Encuentro, Ecuador
In 2001, PHI hosted an international conference program in Ayengue, Ecuador. Called “Encuentro,” the three- day international public health symposium was followed by a village public health project workshop held in a number of rural villages on Ecuador’s Santa Elena Peninsula. The symposium was held from April 30th through May 2nd and the workshop from May 3rd through May 12th. PHI combined classroom educational training techniques with project development experience in the villages. This combination allowed local villagers an opportunity to demonstrate how classroom training can be successfully applied to actual village settings. This approach also provided international public health professionals with actual hands-on experience.
As a follow-up to “Encuentro”, PHI requested that each participant in the international workshop select a new village project for which they would raise funding and carry to fruition using PHI’s indigenous village staffs.
Participants in the conference included international health professionals from Europe, Asia, North, Central and South America, including delegates from the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health.
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Villager Eugenio Coronado, a PHI-trained public health educator from the project village of San Antonio, Ecuador, provides classroom instruction at the international public health conference “Encuentro,” Ayengue, Ecuador, 2001.
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The workshop portion of the conference included a tour of PHI’s two sanitary landfills. Here a few conference participants stand in front of the project office at the “Nariz del Diablo,” landfill near the village of Ayengue, Ecuador.
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