But if you attack it in small pieces, especially context where you can see your change--addressing

it at the village level you see the direct impact that you have.

I run a program called Stomping Out Malaria in Africa, which is a Peace Corps initiative

to bring focus to the work of all 3000 volunteers in Sub-Saharan Africa on the problem of malaria

prevention. What I like about Stomping out Malaria in

Africa is that you're taking lots of individual successes, finding out what made the individual

successes work, and then replicating them in 20 different countries.

I think the one thing that is very unique about Peace Corps than any other organization

that's doing malaria prevention is that we work in the communities that we're serving

in. And so volunteers have the opportunity to reach their targeted population at any

time. The goal of our bootcamp is to provide all

of the volunteers and staff members who are attending a broad and deep knowledge of malaria

prevention. Everything from bed nets through indoor residual spraying, home-based care...

and a good look at the science behind why we do those particular interventions.

One of the projects that I really like to highlight is actually happening here in Senegal.

we had a volunteer who looked at the problems of people not using their bed nets. He went

to his local health post and added up the dollar figure that all of these people had

spent on malaria medications over a year, and it was this astronomical figure. He bought

the same number of rice sacks that that money could buy--he bought the empty ones--and he

filled them with dead grass and he lined them on the street leading up to the clinic. So

everyone that walked by saw this visual indication of just how much they were spending on malaria

prevention in a year. And it made a huge difference in his community. Now people want nets, they

want to use them. And I think that's a great example of what this training can do.

Malaria is a huge problem for mothers. Mothers are much more susceptible to malaria than

the rest of the general population. We target maternal health because its an easy way to

have a large impact, and because when you're working with mothers, you're protecting the

life of a child. One of the biggest arguments in development

is that you can't take one solution to a problem and apply it to every community you're in.

What's great about the initiative is that we can harness the creative energy of 3000

volunteers across the continent and take their best ideas and then effectively implement

them in ways that are specific to each country we're in. For example, if there are PCVs in

Madagascar that are doing amazing things in malaria prevention, we hop on Facebook, we

talk about it, we hash out the details, and then we have them write up a case study so

that it is replicable in the countries across the initiative.

It also allows people back home to really see what's going on here. So we can share

with Americans who are back in the United States all this great information about what

we're doing, so it bridges this gap there used to be between the volunteers who are

isolated in country on their sites and their family and their friends, their communities

back home. Every country is a part of a global community

and when there are groups in that global community that are suffering and unable to function

well in their society because they are dying from completely preventable diseases like

malaria, it affects every country's ability to function at its highest level.