GLOBAL HEALTH

For years, Dr. Jarrahy has traveled overseas to participate in surgical mission trips aimed at providing free surgeries to children in the developing world who have little or no access to even the most basic healthcare. Most recently, as a faculty member of the Center for World Health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the UCLA Blum Center for Poverty and Health in Latin America, and the UCLA Latin American Studies Program, Dr. Jarrahy and the FCS are helping to create innovative ways to study and support the people of Central and South America through a unique combination of surgical and anthropological perspectives.

Maya Baby

I saw you coming in my dreams,

Child of your Grandfather now in the Sky, who disappeared one

day, twenty-eight years ago, murdered by

the mindless man bearing arms and machetes.

Impossible innocence for you;

too much blood in your ancestral umbilical cord.

Rising upwards, moving forward,

You have a chance at a New Life, you are the harbinger of a

new dawn for your people.

How? By being the

Child of your Fatherless Father who, broken hearted,

Became the head of your grandmother's household at age five

and then at ten, off to work the fields because who else would

support your aunt and uncles?

Who came of age with grief and stories I moved through

him and the generations, like DNA, yet,

Whose own journey to the North and back, has given him Wind

to sail instead of bitter Storm to perish in.

For this fatherless Ixil father, face surgery is for him "opens-

hearts" surgery; cuts of love not hate – it is a way for him to

make his family hole.

He expresses Gratitude for the Mavericks, medicine madmen

and women, crazed with caring, whose priceless surgical gift

comes to his Maya baby and gives new breath to all of us who

bear witness.

--Bonni Taub, Ph.D