Peru medical team smashes Wilson's 12,280-foot record

Red and black are popular clothing colors among Quechua girls. 

Well Wilson,
Until now, you were the de facto world record holder for the highest One World Futbol on earth, by virtue of the fact that you were tethered to the top of Washington State's Mount Adams (12,280 feet) in July, 2015. Now there's a new world record, because there are two One World Futbols being kicked around in a tiny Quechua village in Peru at about 14,000 feet. And there are several others that have been delivered to other Peruvian communities, although at lower elevations.

The balls reached Peru courtesy of the 21-person Global Impact health team sent there by Seattle Colleges. Global Impact is the same program that sent 10 of us to Vietnam Aug 21-Sept 1. When I participated in the program in 2011 in Peru, we had three main objectives:

• Install clean-burning stoves in homes that had previously been filled with smoke due to the use of open hearths (no chimneys) for cooking
• Helping build and promote inexpensive water filters that captured 99,9 percent of pathogens that Quechua people risk acquiring every day from their standard water sources.
• Conduct health clinics that included teaching hand washing, teeth brushing, and teeth fluoriding. (Some children's teeth were "horrible," said team leader Lynn Morrison.)

Lynn, who was on the 2011 Peru team with her husband, Charles, is an accomplished photographer, and sent most of the photos you see  in this dispatch. She could have taken a lot more, but when you are heading a 21-person team and organizing each day on the fly, you don't always have a lot of photo ops.

The cheeks of Quechua children often reflect the high altitudes where they live, and where they are exposed to strong wind and strong sunlight.

The Global Impact program always includes professional medical people, but it also includes medical students who participate as part of their education, and lay people who want to help and see how the rest of the world lives. Every year the program is different. This year the team visited three villages, conducting the usual clinics, but also installing to completion 17 stoves with chimneys--which are life changing. Ninety days after a stove is installed, the housewife's lung capacity can increase by as much as 10 percent. The routine task of installing a stove has a strategic impact on fuel economy and better health for the family. The photo below, taken in 2011, illustrates how effective those stoves can be.

When you take a flash photo in a room with smoke, the smoke particles cause glare. This photo from 2011 is crystal clear. The stove is made of adobe, ceramic plates and rebar and is easy to maintain.

Working at remote villages can present some challenges -- such as what happens when two buses come head-to-head on a narrow one-lane gravel road next to a cliff. (After some posturing one backed up. Although it happens infrequently, the drivers are adroit at solving that problem--including being able to back around corners, Lynn reported. Another challenge -- the need to walk slow due to the thin air. And then there is the problem of communicating through three languages--English to Spanish to Quechua, and back again.

In the highest village, there was little motor traffic. Farmers grow potatoes among other crops and raise alpaca for their wool. Farm animals are used for plowing. A nurse visits once a week.

One nice thing about the One World Futbol: you don't have to explain to children how to use it in a mountain village with a tiny school. The school was glad to get them. Below, a portion of the Global Impact team and a One World Futbol pose in front of the school with some of the students.

The sign at the front of the tiny school translates as "initial education."

Love,
Robert, and Jean Baptiste

P.S.

Remember, even if you already donated a One World Futbol, you can still donate, and General Motors will pay for the donation. Here's how:

1. Click www.gmsustainability.com/home.html
2. Click "Help Us Maximize our Impact" bar on the right margin of the page that opens.
3. On the next page, click "Donate a Soccer Ball" and then you're done!