Fortunately for the twins, a medical team from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center had arrived from the United States four days earlier with equipment and was in the middle of a week-long training program for Kosovar doctors and nurses. Doctors determined that the babies needed "constant positive airway pressure," which requires special equipment that had been brought with the Dartmouth medical team for the Healthy Baby Project. The twins were given CPAP and left the hospital as healthy infants several weeks later.
"These events demonstrated that many more babies can and will be treated successfully," Cristina Hammond, director of the Healthy Baby Project, said.
Dartmouth has played an active role in healthcare in Kosovo since 2000, when it first began working in the war-torn nation. The first project was an exchange program with the medical school in Pristina.
"We set up a medical exchange and have had over 80 exchanges back and forth, most of them students," Dr. James Strickler said, one of the coordinators of Dartmouth's Kosovo programs. He also serves as the executive director of a U.S. Agency for International Development project focused on prenatal and perinatal care in Kosovo, part of the former Yugoslavia.
Using funds earmarked for Dartmouth by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., Dartmouth Medical School then embarked on a program to develop primary health care in a mid-sized city. Once that program had ended, Kosovo's Ministry of Health and USAID asked Dartmouth to continue its work, but in a different medical field due to funding issues.
"That led to a second program in developing care for pregnant women in another town, Gjokova," Strickler explained. "At the end of the program in Gjokova, USAID and the Ministry of Health came to us again and said they liked what we were doing and our approach and that there was a very big need for it."
The program was extended to six other regions to see if Dartmouth would be able to improve care of newborns at high risk. The result of this expansion: DMS's current Healthy Baby Project.
"What we're trying to develop is a mechanism for continued funding of these programs after this program," Strickler said. "We're thinking of establishing a foundation in Kosovo to do that and we're in the process of developing a mission alliance with the March of Dimes."
The Healthy Baby Program also counts AmeriCares as one of its partners, creating another Dartmouth connection: The CEO and president of AmeriCares is Curtis Welling '71 Tu'77. AmeriCares, a non-profit disaster relief and humanitarian aid organization, has already given over $13 million to help the Kosovars since the 1996-1999 conflict that destroyed the nation's infrastructure.
"They are recovering from a crisis and they are limited in terms of budget," Hammond said, stressing the need to create sustainable programs.
Despite the limited resources in Kosovo, those involved with the program remain positive.
"We try to use the quote from Arthur Ashe, 'Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can,'" Hammond said. "It makes all of us look at where we are and where we want to be, then look at our resources to utilize them and reach the goals and the vision that we have."
The exchange program has "cut down the numbers," according to Strickler, but students continue to cross the globe and meet with their peers in Hanover or Kosovo.
"We have a Dartmouth student going over this summer and a Kosovo student coming to visit us in the fall," Strickler noted.
That Dartmouth student is Sarah Dotters-Katz, a first-year DMS student who first heard about the Kosovo program through a neighbor.
"It fit really well with my interests and what I wanted to learn about," Dotters-Katz explained. "It's also a part of the world I'd never been to. I wanted to learn about how health care worked in Eastern Europe, to see how their health care system is structured."
As a part of the Dartmouth-Kosovo exchange program, Dotters-Katz is able to follow her interests within the framework and needs of the Kosovo project.
"I really feel like I'm part of the team and that's a nice feeling to have when you walk into a project that's not your own," Dotters-Katz said.
The team Dotters-Katz will join has a great deal of work still ahead. Kosovo has largely fallen "off the radar," Hammond said.
"It takes a long time to recover from a war," Hammond explained. "This is a place in former Yugoslavia where people are well-educated, the literacy rate is above 90 percent, they're very Westernized, but by our standards they're very poor."
Strickler agreed, citing the 50 percent unemployment rate and average monthly salaries that hover around 300 Euros.
"We're not just working on a healthcare problem. The entire infrastructure is being rebuilt. Both the Kosovar government and the aid community are spread pretty thin," Hammond said. "These are not unique problems to Kosovo, they're problems in developing countries of all kinds."
Part of the project is trying to develop a sort of "package" of assistance in these types of post-crisis nations, Hammond said. And with the newest Dartmouth-Kosovo program, they may be close to reaching their goal.
"I think we're on the verge of finding a package we could take other places with this Healthy Newborn Project," Hammond said.
Both Hammond and Strickler emphasized the importance of the "cooperative endeavor" between Kosovars and Americans, as well as the significance of what both students and faculty carry back with them once they leave Kosovo.
"To be there is incredibly moving," Hammond said. "[The Kosovars] are well educated, they're enthusiastic, they're hard-working, they're striving to make a better life for themselves, their families, and a better future for their country."
"There's a phrase the Kosovars use a lot, which is 'step by step,'" Hammond added. "It's a long process, but we take one step at a time."
