The Chicago Tribune - April 18, 2000
Meg McSherry Breslin, Tribune Staff Writer

Before long, the South African children began tugging on her pant leg, smiling as they looked up at her with big, desperate eyes. Later, she learned from health workers that the children--orphans whose mothers had died of AIDS--figured they were "picking their mothers." With each tug, they hoped to find a new home.

That moment in Beverly McElmurry's work as an associate dean in the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago was an awakening, and one that helped solidify much of the efforts now under way at the college to become a global health force.

"This isn't something nebulous; it's that little kid tugging at your pants," McElmurry said. "Once you see that, you've got to figure out is there something I can do to respond to that? It began to help me understand how to broaden our focus on Africa."

UIC's College of Nursing has long maintained a commitment to urban health care programs in Chicago, but for more than a decade now, it has also focused on international efforts, encouraging students to take on research and outreach projects in needy countries across the globe, including Lithuania and Chile.

Recently, the college announced its latest wide-scale world health push: an AIDS education program developed by Carol Christiansen, a professor of nursing at UIC who was a student of McElmurry's. With McElmurry's support, Christiansen's program, developed for the country of Swaziland, will help train 2,500 native rural health workers to bring door-to-door AIDS prevention and education to the nation.

UIC officials say the program is a huge initiative for Swaziland, which, like all of Africa, suffers from a burgeoning AIDS crisis. Health officials estimate that about 22 percent of the country's population is HIV-positive. By 2006, more than 180,000 of its 950,000 people are expected to be HIV-infected, and estimates are that more than 85,000 children will have been orphaned.

After months scouring for financial support, Christiansen won $860,000 from Bristol-Myers Squibb's "Secure the Future" program and the Cabrini Mission foundation to get her three-year program off the ground. She will use an AIDS education curriculum developed by UIC for minority women in Chicago as a base for the Swaziland program.

The college's international push began in 1987, when it became the first and only U.S. nursing school to be designated as a World Health Organization collaborating center, meaning it would work with the health agency to advance primary health care efforts worldwide. Christiansen, who leaves for Swaziland this month, first got interested in Africa after learning of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart's mission in Swaziland while she was a nurse at Chicago's Columbus Hospital, which is operated by the order.

Later, when she was earning her doctoral degree at UIC, she studied female genital mutilation and interviewed at least 20 Somalian immigrants in the United States who were victims of the brutal circumcision. She also created an HIV and AIDS education program for minority women in Chicago, then trained the women to implement it. After that experience, she decided to bring a small program to Swaziland.

After spending three weeks there in July 1998, visiting the tiny huts of the natives with a health worker, she saw people with AIDS lying on the ground with no medicine and poor nutrition and families struggling to cope.

At first she expected to build a small program for the area surrounding the nuns' mission. But the Ministry of Health asked that she expand the program countrywide.

Christiansen's program relies heavily on the government health workers, who are already a backbone of the public health system in Swaziland. Each worker is responsible for visiting seven or eight families on foot.

The rural health workers use crude methods, sometimes carrying only a pad of paper and a pencil, if they can write at all. In many cases, they perform skits to teach lessons in basic hygiene and health and to promote immunization, first aid practices and family planning.

Christiansen will visit Swaziland several times throughout the next year.

"This is to raise the consciousness of people here and there about the issues of AIDS and AIDS prevention," Christiansen said. "And it's really to give some people some hope."
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