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♪ KU choral chant ♪
LEIGH: My name is Leigh Loving.
I'm just finishing up my sophomore year here at KU and I'm the
president and founder of Jayhawk Health Initiative.
We are taking 25 KU students down to Panama on a
medical brigade.
We will be providing medical care to an underdeveloped
region in Panama.
LEIGH: We want to give these students the opportunity to act
like a doctor when they're in college, before they go on to
medical school.
JOE: This is what I want to do.
I'm very interested in medicine and that's my ultimate goal.
This is kind of like a once-in-a-lifetime experience to travel
and to do something like this during college.
LEIGH: You'll be taking blood pressure, weight, height, and
our clinic, it will be in the Quebrada Honda community.
MARILYNN: One of my goals is definitely to teach the children
there how to take care of themselves, maybe how to
brush their teeth.
Simple things in the U.S. that we take for granted here.
LEIGH: Right now we're in my dorm room here at GSP and I am
surrounded by all of the donations and medications that we
have received.
We've been given about 900 toothbrushes and we also received
a $95,000 donation from Heart-to-Heart International.
LEIGH: We were able to provide care to over 300 patients.
They were really receptive of what we were doing.
MARILYNN: You don't really think that it's going to be life
changing, but you are impacting these peoples' lives as well as
your own.
You learn a lot from the doctors from just getting hands-on
experience in the triage.
It's one of those experiences that you just can't get
enough of.
LEIGH: We would have five-year-old kids who would come in
and their teeth would just be rotted out with cavities.
And so that was sad to see, but we had a dentist who performed
tons of extractions throughout the week.
MARILYNN: I had a really good relationship with one of the
little girls.
The very first day I was kind of taking the patients'
information and I saw her with her mom.
I kind of just took notice of her.
She was kind of shy.
And then, as the couple days went by, she kind of warmed up to
me and at the end she drew me a little picture and it was
really sweet.
LEIGH: Experiencing how they live their lives, it just really
makes me feel grateful for what we have here in America.
It also really motivates me to continue my schooling and to
continue my quest to become a doctor.
The Jayhawk Health Initiative is going to be expanding in the
next couple of years.
We hope to do at least one to two medical mission trips a year.
I also hope to implement a shadowing course where students will
be able to receive credit from the university shadowing in
local hospitals and at local doctors' offices.