A personal perspective on choosing to work toward global child health

I grew up in the bush in Northern Ontario. There were miles and miles of trees, rocks and rivers, and strong, kind people living far apart from each other. Some of them earned their living by hunting, fishing and trapping, others were maintenance men on the coast-to-coast Canadian National Railway, who had come from central Europe to this country of opportunity. They were lonely; they sent for their wives who, when they came, were lonelier. They had children, but there were no schools, no books, no roads and no health services. These people lived in what may have well been called ‘poverty’. Someone in Ontario's government had a brilliant idea. A retired railway coach (#15071) was converted into a school with desks, maps, books and a teacher – Fred Sloman, from Clinton, Ontario, who believed in people and dreams. He taught poor children in the bush, children of trappers and railway workers and eventually of miners and lumbermen as the North opened up. The school car was moved every week to a new stop. At 16:00 everyday, the children went home and their parents moved into the school room to learn to read, write and speak Canada's languages. Fred Sloman's wife was a wonderful teacher too. Together they raised five children in the school car; I was the second of the Sloman ‘school car children’. The school car experiment was a success, and eventually Ontario had seven school cars in the North – schools that taught hundreds of children until the country opened up with roads, jobs, stores and schools without wheels! Our school car is now retired to a park in Clinton, Ontario, as a popular site for school children and families to picnic. This was the only school I attended until I went to the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario), and graduated in 1951 with an MD degree. I wanted to pursue paediatrics because I had seen many children in the North die of measles, tuberculosis, preventable diseases and injuries, ignorance and poverty. So I went to Montreal, Quebec, to the Montreal Children's Hospital (MCH), which became the centre of my world because of its wonderful people and great teachers – too many to list, but Dr Alan Ross in particular took over my education where my father left off. He inspired all of us to learn about childhood illnesses and prevention as well as why the children living in poverty in that beautiful city had so many health problems. He taught us that we had a responsibility for the world's children as well as our own. Dr Ross sent me and Don Hillman, who was a McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) 1951 graduate, off to Boston, Massachusetts, for further training, and then offered us positions at the MCH. We returned to Montreal and McGill and were married, and ‘lived happily ever after’ for 51 years. Dr Ross remained our mentor and teacher as long as he lived – how lucky we were! We learned that there were many ways of working to achieve what has now been articulated as the first Millennium Development GoaIs to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty. I remember working with Dr Charles Larson and others with pleasure in Pointe St Charles (Montreal, Quebec) storefront clinics in the 1960s, and with Dr Colin Forbes in Caughnawaga (Quebec). In those days, just as in northern Ontario, health services did not reach needy people. When Dr Ross retired, he went to Africa, specifically Kenya, to help build a medical school in Nairobi. Until then, Kenyan students had to attend Makerere University medical school in Uganda. The Canadian International Development Agency funded a unique McGill – Kenya Project in which McGill faculty and MCH residents worked in Africa to help Kenyans develop their own medical school. At MCH, we had learned that students could lead the way in effective outreach programs with faculty support. In Kenya, providing health care in remote areas was a bigger problem because transportation was difficult, but Kenyan student leaders such as Professor Julius Meme and others led the way. Don and I served in Africa twice, for two years each time. (Eventually we had five children, who went with us and attended Kenyan schools; a great learning experience for them, as for us.) We later returned many times to Kenya, keeping in touch with ex-students who are now leaders in paediatric and government child health services. After Kenya, Don was made Chairman of Paediatrics at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and we spent 13 happy years there, and since then we have continued our shorter term teaching visits, most often as volunteers, to universities in Uganda, Laos, South Africa, Guyana, Malaysia, China and the Philippines. I am very glad Don and I had the opportunity to work with students and paediatric colleagues in so many countries for so many years. We had a very happy and rewarding life together until July 2006 when Don died. I will continue whatever I can do to encourage students to promote children's health in needy parts of the world, as long as I can be useful, because I believe so strongly that the Millennium Development Goals can be met. We must oppose the two great enemies for healthy children – poverty made worse by wars and the unnecessary wars inflicted on poor countries for profit. Women and children are the ones that suffer most in wars. Women and children are also the ones that suffer most from poverty. We, as teachers and health workers, can work toward the goal by inspiring students to fight war and poverty, whether it be in exotic places like Kenya, or in northern Canada, or in the community where we work today.

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