As GEO expanded, awareness of hearing loss and the disabiling effects it has on populations also grew. We at GEO found ourselves confronting a new and daunting challenge how to continue our work and also expand and make our model of care making it sustainable, widely available, and without sacrificing quality for quantity, principles for expediency.
In 2005, GEO was approached by the Christoffell Blinden Mission, an NGO from Germany to help consult and develop programs for hearing loss and prevention in Latin America. It proved to be an offer we could not refuse. In the face of latin America and specifically a large indigenous andean population in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru of well over 50 million, we could not shy away from an opportunity to bring hope to thousands of people and to subject our model of care to the acid test as an example of a sustainable educational and humanitarian based approach that could be scaled up, by ourselves and others, to save the lives and answer to the needs of millions. And so we laid the groundwork and begin our first initiative in Quito, Ecuador in 2006 in our partnership with Foundacion Nahim Isaias and CBM as our inaugural partnership in South America.
For the past 8 years, the guiding principles of GEO have been determined by the collective voice of the communities in which we serve rather than by the ever-shifting demands of government policies and economics. Our goals and the number of lives that we help have increased hand-in-hand, thanks to the growing cadre of funders who have supported GEO. Over the years, one patient has become ten, then hundreds. And as the number of patients served has grown, so have our efforts to document and disseminate the best parts of our model of health care to new generations of clinicians through education and service to the underserved.
Earlier this year, I was talking to a young medical student in EL Salvador, and in that discussion, she asked me why I was involved in the work that I do. I told her that I had been treating patients in private practice in the USA for many years and that I realized that in order to use ones human potential, one has to give back to the world and live life to the fullest. On this order I recalled the quotation from Churchill, "You make a living by what you get and a life by what you give". Her question reminded me that many people are not aware of the remarkable abilities that they possess and how in an idealistic and yet realistic way they can make a differnce in the world by giving of themselves. At GEO we have done this by opening the doors to many who would otherwise not have had the opportunbity for health care, as well as to students and physicians globally who wish to be part of the GEO cause.
Thanks to the many partners and long associations with supporters and coworkers, GEO is making a difference in the world and we hope to leave in those countries where we work in an ever lasting presence by leaving our knowledge with those physicians who will serve in our footsteps. Explore the pages of this website and you will learn about projects and people that that have offered abundant reasons for hope and underscore GEOs long-term reliance not just on hope but on a model of a comprehensive sustainable health care that includes providing tools to the medical community to improve the lives of people affected with ear disease and hearing loss whose lives are distorted by the grim reality of poverty, hunger, depression, living in substandard housing, and isolation, and who often feel their suffering has gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. Here is the evidence.
