I was traveling yesterday, so I scheduled yesterday’s post and hopped on a plane. Little did I know that my server would somehow forget to do what I told it. Sorry! If you’re looking for yesterday’s post, you can find it here. (Or if you’re reading by e-mail, just scroll down.)
There are a lot of people who aren’t very thrilled with healthcare in the United States. Yes, it can be atrociously expensive, but at least we have access to pretty much any medical procedure out there. Whether it’s something very basic or something that has never been tried before, the US certainly has the medical infrastructure to get the job done. There are plenty of countries in the world where even the most basic medical care is out of reach, and there are other countries where basic medical care becomes out of reach due to a crisis. That’s where New York City based Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) comes in. They provide “aid in nearly 60 countries to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters.” Doctors Without Borders does this by recruiting both medical and non-medical personnel to travel abroad to offer a level of medical assistance that is well beyond what is typically available.
You don’t have to go to med school to make a difference through Doctors Without Borders. There are plenty of opportunities for lay people to get involved and make a difference. Here’s a sample of the work that Doctors Without Borders does:
In 2006, MSF medical teams gave more than 9 million outpatient consultations; hospitalized almost half a million patients; delivered 99,000 babies; treated 1.8 million people for malaria; treated 150,000 malnourished children; provided 100,000 people living with HIV/AIDS with antiretroviral therapy; vaccinated 1.8 million people against meningitis; and conducted 64,000 surgeries.
If that sounds like the kind of work that you’d like to be involved with, then you should head over to Doctors Without Borders’ Work page. You can learn more about working in the field, or you can take a look at their Paid Internship opportunities. They offer internships three times a year, and the deadlines are January 8, 2010 for Spring Internships; April 15, 2010 for Summer Internships; and August 2, 2010 for Fall Internships. Their internship positions include Access Intern, Development Intern, Editorial Intern, Executive Intern, Field Human Resources Intern, Foundations and Corporations Intern, Human Resources, Systems Intern, Major Gifts Intern, Marketing Intern, Planned Giving Intern, Press Intern, Program Intern, Public Events Intern, and Web Intern. You can find full descriptions on the internships page, and you can apply by sending a résumé and cover letter to internships@newyork.msf.org with Subject line: (Internship Title – Term). They’ll even let you apply for multiple positions, so be sure to send a separate application for each if that’s what you want to do.
Links to Help You Begin Your Research
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Tags: administrative, communications, development, editorial, events, healthcare, human resources, information technology, international, Internships, marketing, medicine, New York, non-profit, outreach, paid, program development, public relations, web development, writing
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