December 2000 • Volume 6 Number 12
Heartbreak and hope
Physicians With Heart takes aid to AzerbaijanBY JANE STOEVER
The Physicians With Heart delegation, including 11 family physicians, trudged down broken stone steps and through a long tunnel to visit "internally displaced persons" in the basement of an unfinished building in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital.
Women cooked in the common kitchen in the hallway. About 20 families had a room apiece with damp floors, a few beds and an occasional table.
When the displaced persons fled in the early 1990s from a war-torn area now controlled by Armenia, each family tried to carry one valuable. Hanging in a dingy basement room was one family's prized possession: a crystal chandelier.
Daniel Van Durme, M.D., laughs with children in an orphanage near Baku about the pictures just taken by Physicians With Heart delegates.
Heave ho: Mary Lynass, M.D., of Tempe, Ariz., helps an airport worker unload medical supplies in Nakhchivan City.
"In all my involvement with international work, I've never had exposure to refugees or displaced persons," said Daniel Ostergaard, M.D., AAFP vice president for international and interprofessional activities. "In Azerbaijan, we had the opportunity to see their conditions."
A family of "internally displaced persons" meets a visitor in the kitchen of the Baku basement that serves as home for about 20 IDP families.
The Azerbaijan journey Oct. 6-15 marked the eighth annual airlift to a former Soviet republic by Physicians With Heart, a project of the AAFP, AAFP Foundation and Heart to Heart International, a humanitarian aid organization based in Olathe, Kan.
The IDP camp in Baku was one of many sites the delegates visited in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea in southwest Asia. Physicians With Heart distributed $1.9 million worth of medicine and supplies to Azeri clinics and health posts. The donations will benefit the needy, including displaced persons and refugees from other countries.
The delegates also brought an orphanage near Baku a washer, dryer, winter coats, and toys from AAFP resident and student members.
The delegation to Azerbaijan introduced Azeri physicians to family practice, a foreign concept to most of them. "We think family practice could help you meet your people's needs," AAFP Director Daniel Van Durme, M.D., of Tampa, Fla., said at sessions explaining the specialty in Baku and Nakhchivan City.
Next year, Physicians With Heart will visit Vietnam Feb. 16-26 and will conduct an airlift to a former Soviet republic in the fall. For details on the Vietnam airlift, check http://www.aafp.org/airlift/ or call Maya Singh at (405) 787-5200.
Strategic plan reflects world view
The Academy's strategic plan now includes a global focus, thanks to changes made by the Board of Directors and reviewed by the Congress of Delegates in September.
One element of the Academy's updated mission statement is "to advance and represent the specialty of family practice worldwide." One of 10 strategic directions is now "to facilitate and encourage activities of AAFP members toward meeting humanitarian needs worldwide and toward the global development of family practice."
The prior vision statement referred to all Americans. Now it says, "The AAFP will create quality, accessible health care ... dedicated to the health, dignity and well-being of all people."
Go to http://www.aafp.org/policy/1.html for a copy of the strategic plan, or call (800) 944-0000 and request #R412.
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2000 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
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