Engineering Students Deliver, Fix Medical Equipment Around the World

maloka

Published October 12, 2008, last updated on March 22, 2013 under Education News

Jenna Maloka (Pratt, Class of 2009) didn’t expect to see babies dying from the cold in Africa. “I was in Arusha, Tanzania, and it was winter,” she says. “I wore a fleece each day, and in the hospital where I worked, the incubator was broken. Two baby twins died from the cold while we were there. That’s when we figured we had to do something.”

Thanks to the Duke-Engineering World Health Summer Institute that Maloka was participating in, she had the tools at hand to “do something.” Maloka was one of 49 students involved in this year’s two-month program that put engineering students to work in hospitals in Tanzania, Nicaragua, and Honduras. The students fixed old equipment, set up thousands of dollars worth of donated medical equipment, and trained doctors, nurses, and staff how to use and maintain the equipment.

 

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