Demise of the Internet is already on our horizon. Like the information technologies before it – think of AOL and 3.5 inch disks – what is today’s mainstream will one day be a distant dream. Next up is The Grid. Built with dedicated fiber optic cables delivering speeds 10,000 times faster than broadband, real-time meetings with holographic stages and participants are no longer sci-fi. One step further is Brain Net, brain-to-brain communication connecting computers to living minds and thus to one another – relaying not simply ideas but also human emotions and reactions.The Internet as we know it will come to an end. But in the meantime we make best use of the available technologies – like the new INMED website. Technologies shift. They are not an end in themselves. Rather, technologies are a means of expressing values, and the core values of INMED do not shift.
- We are committed to forgotten people. John Clements is an American ophthalmologist serving in Angola, southern Africa. John just completed the INMED International Medicine Fellowship at the Boa Vista eye center. Over the last two years he’s restored sight for hundreds of blind persons, like a nine-year old born from congenital cataracts. Immediately following surgery in August her mother exclaimed to me, “My daughter was destined to life of poverty and abuse, and now has received her sight!”
- We are stewards. Nancy Crigger is a family nurse practitioner, professor of nursing at Graceland University, and recipient of the INMED International Healthcare Preceptor Award. For over two decades Dr. Crigger continues to inspire and instruct nursing students in the virtues and nuances of healthcare in Central America. Communication of keen insights into culture and ethics is her mindful intention. Nancy Crigger shares, “I am excited over helping learners to stimulate sustainable health improvements throughout Latin America.”
- We value all human life. Tim Myrick is faulty physician for the INMED International Medicine International Medicine & Public Health Intensive Hybrid Course. Fluent in Arabic, he and wife Lori write from the Zaatari Camp in Jordan where they care for Syrian refugees, “Today we cared for many patients, including a man with heart failure and a scarily septic child. It’s pretty desperate here, and will be difficult for us when we must say goodbye.”
- We are partners. Anil Cherian, MPH, is Director of Community Health and Development for India’s Emmanuel Hospital Association – an INMED International Medicine and International Public Health Training Site. Since 2007 he and Emmanuel Hospital Association (EHA) colleagues have trained and supervised INMED learners in the course of their mission to prevent HIV infection, increase adolescent health, and provide hospice care. Anil Cherian challenges us to, “Look carefully and compassionately at those who are poor and learn from them.”
Shifting technologies should be a reminder that at the core what matters is not the phone we are using but with whom are talking, not what is our operating system but how we personally operate, and not which is our technological interface but what we actually communicate.