 Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Thank you for tuning in and welcome to Mentor Talks. Mentor Talks is a Facebook live series for exchange program alumni and anyone interested in improving themselves and their communities. Every month we bring you mentors who share their stories and offer tips and advice. My name is Asha Bay, and I'm joining you from Washington, DC and the Office of Alumni Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Our office opens the door to alumni networking, professional development, and grant opportunities. Today, we're excited to welcome two exchange alumni who are doing great things for their communities in the face of COVID-19. Dr. Collins Sananthu Dasami, a community solutions program and YCLE alumnus from Malaysia, and Dr. Yemen Hatet, a Hubert H. Humphrey alumnus from Myanmar. Both are part of the recently launched U.S. ASEAN Health Futures Alumni Network, which connects medical and public health alumni in ASEAN countries with U.S. experts. Dr. Collins is sharing a story of two of his initiatives. The first one distributes aid to family in need, families in need. The second one tracks how breast cancer patients have been affected by COVID. Dr. Yemen is sharing a story of his project that addresses the mental health and educational needs of children in disadvantaged communities. Before we get into conversation with Dr. Collins and Dr. Yemen, we want to hear from you, our online viewers. Send us your comments and questions right here on Facebook. Now let's turn to Dr. Yemen. Thank you so much for joining us today from Myanmar. Can you tell us more about your project? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Yeah, this is Dr. Yemen speaking from Rangun, Myanmar, and my pleasure to be part of the talk. And yeah, I would like to share a project which aims to improve care and mental health and social development during the time of COVID-19 crisis. Yeah, COVID-19 crisis has an impact on children, which cannot be neglected. And we all have to remember this, you know, in all countries around the world, and some children will have an impact for life long. And many of these children living in the poor countries will have the most impact. Yeah, so these children in the poorest neighborhoods, and they will have the most impact. Some of these children will have the life-long impact, and, you know, the most impact will be among the most vulnerable children. So I launched a project called improving mental health of these children during the COVID-19 crisis. Let me give you the brief of the project in a summarized way. So the project is called Wutao Yangji, and it started in 2017, and which aims to improve the lifespan of the vulnerable children living at the orphanage centers in Myanmar. And it's led by the local youth. And many of these children come from the complete area, and these children usually suffered a variety of, you know, the psychological aspects, and this lead to, you know, and the development in their life. So through this project, what we do there is we actively try to find the libraries and donate books and form these small groups, and they learn their life space, they discuss, they talk to their peers, and they share what they think, and they express themselves. So the important point is in the time of COVID-19 crisis, they need an opportunity to express themselves and, you know, to be able to share their thoughts and their self in a way that how they cope, and in a way that they talk to their peers. They are in discussion with their teachers, and they are in discussion with adults. And what we do there is, you know, they pick up the book, they read, they talk to their peers, they learn, and they share. And in that way, they are coping their mental stress, and they are expressing themselves in a way that they reflect who they are, and in a way that they build their confidence. And in a way, they become the person who are able to, you know, build self-esteem within themselves. So, and we really have seen input through that project, and a lot of them become able to strongly express who they are, and what they feel, and how they cope in the type of very difficult situations like COVID-19 crisis. And we were so proud that the project led by the youth, and then the project is very much participated by the chairmen, and the chairmen are getting benefit out of it. So, thank you. Sure, that's great. And I believe you mentioned that, for example, they read books about Nelson Mandela. And other, like, leaders that inspire them, and it helps, and it just helps them realize that there's a bigger world, and there's more going on. Yeah, exactly. You know, one of, they are engaged in the very much different topics, which includes, you know, about the leaders around the world, and also different social topics. Definitely, you know, they learn about leadership from those books, and then they discuss about, you know, what is their inspiration, and then what is their kind of inspirational leadership from these great people. And they discuss about, you know, diversity in the leadership, and they discuss about, you know, how a girl could be a leader as well. And that is very grateful to see what come up from their thoughts. And then, you know, they are really inspired by such great leaders, and I'm really proud of it. That's great. You should be proud. So thank you, Dr. Yemen. Dr. Collins, thank you for joining us from Malaysia. Can you tell us about how you're helping your community with emergency aid during this pandemic? Thanks a lot for having me here. I'm really happy to be here to be sharing two stories, actually, that I think would be very interesting for the general crowd. So these two sort of projects are not my initiative. I'm just very privileged to be involved in the whole process. It's very community based, ground up sort of solutions for problems that are very specific to local communities. And so the first sort of project that I would like to share with everyone is an aid distribution project that actually happened in Bangladesh. I had some experience in Bangladesh. My alma mater was there. I did medical school in Chittagong. And so in Chittagong, we had two groups of youth, one group that was based out of a rural sort of setting in the Chittagong Hilltracks, and another group of youth that actually established a school in a railway slum, which has about 120 students currently studying there. And so when the COVID sort of outbreak happened in Bangladesh, there was a lot of concern in terms of food security and safety within these two communities, which are low income communities, but very different. One on the one hand is, you know, in a rural area, and another is in an urban slum. So the approach that had to be sort of addressed was kind of different in both cases because we initially first started off with the rural area because transport was cut off and many of the farmers couldn't find ways to sell their produce. And so the youth in that area actually identified 84 families across 15 villages in this hill track area that needed help. And they actually worked to raise funds to collect money to purchase emergency aid that was actually distributed to 84 families. So the issue at that time was, you know, we didn't want to do more harm than good because at the time in a lot was not known about the virus. And so we wanted to develop sort of approach and a solution whereby we could feel safe that instead of us giving out aid and, you know, possibly transmitting the virus to these rural communities that have remained isolated so long. We wanted to make sure that in the process of doing the distribution, we don't, you know, sort of, you know, transmit the virus to these communities. And so the youth actually came up with their own sort of protocols, and I was very lucky to be involved in the process. And so I was giving my feedback and coming up with ideas of how we could sort of reduce the risk or mitigate the risk so that, you know, we wouldn't have any unwanted incidents. And everything went smoothly. So some of the solutions that they developed, for example, were, you know, going to the market and purchasing the rise in bulk and then bringing it to a sorting centre and then using a different set of volunteers to actually repackage these relief aid into individual packets and then having a different set of volunteers to go out to the community so that these volunteers actually weren't in direct connection with each other. And so maybe that would help to sort of, you know, reduce the risk of the transmission of the virus. And of course protocols like, you know, using a bleach solution to sanitize disinfect things. These are very sort of ground up solutions that came up from this community. In the second community, the one that was in the urban slum, they also did the same thing. And what we sort of did for that particular area was we used contactless delivery. So volunteers would go to the houses and they would traditionally it would be, you know, hand over and take a picture shake a hand or something like that. But now we would go to the houses and we would leave the bags of aid on the doorstep without actually coming in direct contact with the family. And we hope that that would help to reduce the risk as well. So all in all, over three tons of aid was distributed to these families in both these sort of areas. And it was very sort of heartwarming to see because the youth were actually leading this movement and they came up and they said, you know, we are the youth. We see the problem in this community and we want to do something for our community. And I was very, very sort of happy to be part of it and to see the energy that comes out of the US, which is really, really inspiring. The second project that I would like to talk a little bit about is what we are doing with cancer research Malaysia here. So during the MCO we understood that there may be some sort of shortcomings or difficulties that breast cancer patients in Malaysia may actually be facing. And so the objective we conducted a survey and the objective of the survey was actually just to see what were the how would breast cancer patients sort of coping with the virus and the lockdown which is called the movement control order in Malaysia where movement was restricted, businesses were shut and things like that. And so the PNP study, the patient navigation program is actually a program that was developed by cancer research Malaysia. And it works in four hospitals across Malaysia and four different states. And it's a navigation program where nurses walk together with breast cancer patients to ensure that the success rate goes up. So previously one out of seven patients would drop out of treatment at some point of time because the journey is quite long from diagnosis to treatment and follow up. And then all the sessions you have to keep all the appointments on top of that you know the financial impact on the family, emotional impact on the family as well. And so with the patient navigation program, we now have over 95% of patients completing the treatment course. And of course that contributes to a very good prognosis for the cancer patients. So the survey actually found that one out of four cancer patients, breast cancer patients in Malaysia are actually in crisis. And when we say in crisis, it means that they are experiencing financial crisis emotional crisis. And the study even found that, you know, households which earn less than 3000 ring it a month are three times more likely to be in crisis, as compared to a family that is a carer. So if a patient were to have a family member who was there to be able to help them and care for them. And they were actually five times less likely to be in crisis. So these are some interesting sort of facts that have come out of the study. I think more details is there's a lot to talk about in that on that particular sort of survey that was done during the MCO, the movement control order the lockdown in Malaysia. And the entire sort of report and the stories can be found on cancer research dot my slash stories. If you're really interested in if you want to read more about it, you can go into cancer research dot my slash stories. And you can look at the reports and some of the stories and some of the testimonials from patients who have actually gone through the whole process. That's great. And so have you been able to share that with the health alumni network. Yeah, so I think maybe I would have posted it on the health futures alumni network as well. I'm not too sure I got to go back and check. Okay, it's okay. So thank you so much Dr Collins and thank you Dr Yemen. It's been great to hear about the positive impact you're both making in your communities during the COVID-19 crisis viewers, along with posting your questions don't forget to share your stories in the comments. Hopefully you can connect with each other and maybe even collaborate on a project together. Thanks for your time. So let's get some questions. Our first one is, what's your advice for launching a project from taking it from idea to action, especially during a crisis. And how has your alumni network supported you. Dr Yemen, would you like to start. You know, they are great ideas that has to become actualized. But at the time of crisis or difficult situation is hard to do it. But I think, you know, we really have to go from the process. For me, I have noticed, you know, several problems on my chair in my community. One of them is, you know, these children are very low as things, especially they come from the very disadvantage social background. So I needed to do something. And then in the time of crisis, they need something, they need somebody who will talk to them, who will listen to them and who could, who could able to reassure their psychological and their mental well being, their emotional well being. So I just, you know, think of, okay, what can I do, I talk to teachers, I talk to, you know, the, the principal, I talk to, to the responsible person at the orphanage school, and then, okay, let's do what we can do. And then this is the first step, we can do a lot of great things. That is my advice. Great. And Dr Collins, how about you. What would your advice be. I think, you know, we are always looking to create sustainable solutions, the solutions that last for a long period of time and not just a one hit wonder or feel good thing. And I think that in a time of a crisis, this is really difficult because we don't have the time or the sort of the usual methodology to come and sit down and have a conversation to talk about and plan about how we're going to implement things. So that is definitely a challenge. But I think like in the case of these particular projects that I've seen a lot of the sort of work was done by the local resource so the grassroots. And I think it's very important that we build capacity within the grassroots community so that when sort of a pandemic like this sort of strikes. The community is able to mobilize very quickly and contribute to such a project. And I think that is the key towards sort of developing a solution, especially in terms of prices like this. But from medical side, I can say that one of the things that we are very, very concerned about in times of crisis is the question of whether we are actually doing good or harm. You know, when we go in, sometimes we have all the best intentions, but we end up actually causing more problems than good. And it's very important that we think about different aspects of what we're doing before we actually do it. So we have to make sure that we don't actually cause damage. And the best way to actually prevent something like that from happening is to consult with, you know, a lot of experts out there and a lot of resources that we can tap into our networks and get their advice, get your questions. What do you think about this? What do you think we should do? How do you think we can mitigate the risk? And especially local solutions for local problems, very specific. Something that's feasible, something that can be done. I think those are some key important points that we need to keep in mind when we're responding in an emergency situation such as this. Okay. And I'm just curious, what, can you give like an example of what like a problem that might be caused by going in like without fully considering all the different options? So for example, maybe not related to coronavirus, so maybe I can talk about in times of floods, for example. So when a flood has hit a community, we go in and we say, oh, you know, the community, they need these medications, they need water purifying tablets, for example. When we go in, we come in with buckets and we come in with water purification tablets. But when we don't teach the community properly because they've never used water purification tablets before. So we go out and distribute, okay, we distribute 10,000 water purification tablets, great job. But then the community trading is not there for that particular device or that particular tablet, you see. So in the end, they use the tablet in an incorrect way. And then that ends up causing more damage to the health than actually good. So that's just one kind of an example of how we need to sort of think about other things that we, you know, sometimes may miss. Okay. All right, so we have some more questions. We have Osmo from Facebook who's asking about self quarantining. What precautions should people take to protect at risk members of their communities after quarantining? One of you like to take this? Okay. Okay. Let me take that question. But I will respond, you know, from the perspective of the children. And especially, you know, our children have been directly or indirectly suffered the impact of the COVID-19. One of the things is, you know, they might be separated from their parents because their parents might be in the quarantine. In the project that I am working, the parents are mostly orphanage. So they don't have parents. So although themselves are at risk, like sort of, you know, they live at the orphanage standards. They are something like already in the quarantine stage, sort of detached from their communities or, you know, from their society a bit. So the takeaway from me is, you know, it is very important that we really allow children to express their feelings, their thoughts, especially in the difficult times. Also, it applies the same. It is very important that we need to listen from the people who are under quarantine or from the people who are detached from society or who are marginalized. So in all these situations, and then let them be allowed to express themselves in a way that, you know, we understand, we connect, because we might be doing physical distancing, but we should be socially connected. We should be socially mutually more connected than the time ever. So that is my takeaway. That is my message. Okay. Sounds like good advice. And so let me go on to the next question. This one's from Naisha Vandesan who's watching the program now. Hello, Naisha. She thinks your study was very good, Dr. Collins, and she writes that much more such research needs to be done for those with non-communicable diseases. Do you have plans to continue your research with breast cancer patients and how they are being affected by COVID-19? Yeah, so definitely. Thank you so much for the comment. Yeah. Yes, definitely, non-communicable diseases and mental health will be the next thing that we really, really focus on, because right now with the pandemic, it's like a fire. And now they're fighting this big fire that's burning. But in the meantime, we must not forget that non-communicable disease patients are still there. And it's, you know, growing, it's a growing problem in Southeast Asia. And we must not forget about these patients. So the Cancer Research Malaysia, the patient navigation program that works together with the Ministry of Health, it's ongoing. It's a program that has been running for quite some time and will continue to run. And definitely, there will be a lot more focus given to it's not just breast cancer patients, but cancer patients in Malaysia as well. All different types of cancers. I think the focus really, really needs to continue for sustainable solutions, representing Asians, you know, in the cancer genomic sort of profile across the world and things like that. That's good advice. So let's go to our next question. In times of crisis such as these, it can be hard to stay motivated and energized. Where do you draw your inspiration from? Do you have any resources that you'd be willing to share for others to draw inspiration from? Let me take it. I think, you know, we really need to find our stuff. What can we do in the time of crisis, in the time of those difficult situations? I do think that, you know, for me, the children are always, you know, one of the priorities, especially when they are vulnerable, when they are marginalized. We do have to provide additional care. We do have to show some love. So I find it like, okay, what can I do in the time of crisis for them in addition to what I have been doing in the past? So I do think that, okay, this is the time they learn how to cope. They learn how to build their confidence in a way that, you know, not just COVID-19, it costs them a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress and a lot of difficulties, additionally important. And so they find some stuff, like in a way, they cope for a better life. They find life skills. And I would say that, you know, the motivation comes from you and also the motivation comes from your communities. The motivation comes when you start looking at what you can do for your communities. Yes, it reminds me of a quote from Kennedy about, ask not what you can do for yourself, but for your country. I'm mangling that quote a little bit, but basically it's about community service. Anyway, let's get on to the next question. Have you collaborated with fellow exchange alumni on projects, or are you looking to collaborate with them in the future? Yeah, so maybe I can share a little bit about that. So actually I was in the States during my 2018 program with the Community Solutions Program. And it was in, I was actually there in Nashville, I found not mistaken, when the earthquake hit in Lombok, Indonesia, there was a tsunami and there was an earthquake, and there was quite a lot of devastation in Lombok. And I was very sort of lucky to be introduced to a CSP alumni who was actually from Lombok and he actually had a project that was running there. And so at the time when I heard about him and his project and the impact of the earthquake and the tsunami in Lombok, I wanted to be able to help as much as I can. And so I reached out to the Magical Light Foundation, which is based out of Singapore. I'm serving as the country director for Bangladesh, and the founder Ben Chong, who is a great mentor to me. He was interested to respond to the emergency that had happened in Indonesia. And I said, you know, hey, there's this guy, you know, I'm a genetic, he's there in Lombok, and he has an organization. And maybe we can work together with him to do something. And so the team, the Magical Light team from Singapore actually went down to Lombok, and they actually worked with Ahmad Junaidi and they built I think if I'm not mistaken somewhere between 30 to 40 temporary schools, because what had happened was during the earthquake, the schools had collapsed, and children were not able to go to school and study. They needed some temporary safe shelters to have classes in. The Magical Light went in. I mean, I think the approach was great. It was them going into the community and asking them, you know, what do you need? How can we help you? The community said, oh, you know, we need tools, we need wheelbarrows, we need shovels, we need wood, we need things like that. And so Ben and the team were able to sort of supplement and help them, you know, get these resources that they needed. And with the community support, they were able to, you know, do this project, which I think was a great impact. That's great. Yeah, it sounds like it really helped the community a lot. Okay, so we have one last question. What are your plans for future health projects? What's next? Yeah, for me, we are in discussion with other country fellows and, you know, to work on collaborative projects around the finding the global solutions on some of the problems that we can contribute for the finding solutions. Like, you know, for the country program, we do have different backgrounds and different A's parties, you know, and then now we are in a conversation to work on a journal that, you know, that provides, you know, our A's parties to be able to share with other fellow colleagues and also to be able to share with our communities. And that would be, you know, very interesting conversation and to be continued very soon. Okay, great. Thank you. So it looks like we're just about out of time. Thank you very much Dr. Yemen and Dr. Collins for being here and for joining us during your spare time. And a big thank you to you or online viewers for participating today. If you're interested in learning about more opportunities for exchange alumni, you can visit our website at alumni.state.gov and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks for watching and see you all for our next mentor talks.