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WiRED International Receives the First Annual “Make A Difference Award” from Affinity Internet

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2003 was a busy year for us. We were actively working on large programs in Kenya, Nicaragua and Honduras, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo, and we just started a major program in Iraq to provide physicians and students with access to medical libraries. We had not yet begun arranging live teleconferences between Iraqi and American doctors, but that was in the active planning stage and would begin soon.

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WiRED’s Community Health Information Centers

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Twenty years ago to the month, WiRED opened a Community Health Information Center (CHIC) in a small Kenyan village, called Butula. Most of our other CHICs were in larger towns and cities, but Butula was different, and it presented an opportunity for us to test the range of our novel concept to use computers to present science-based, medical and health information.

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Internet Reaches Out to a Struggling Community

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Early in January 2002, WiRED joined with two other NGOs (non-governmental organizations or non-profits) to launch an Internet access facility in León, Nicaragua. The joint venture brought computers to this town in Northwestern Nicaragua, often referred to as the liberal political and intellectual center of Nicaragua. At this point in the evolution of Internet technology, most people had heard of the Internet, but most had not seen a computer or accessed the Web.

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U.S. Ambassador to Kenya to Dedicate Medical Information Center at the University of Nairobi

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With funding support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, WiRED set up 24 Community Health Information Centers across Kenya. In addition to those public access facilities, we installed the first Medical Information Center (MIC) at the University of Nairobi School of Medicine, the country’s largest medical school. At a time when few people had their own computers and no one owned smartphones, this first-of-a-kind computer facility opened doors to research and study never before available to medical professors and students at the university.

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WiRED mourns the Loss of Diplomat in Iraq

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In the main headquarters lobby of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., stands a wall bearing memorial plaques that honor fallen Americans who lost their lives while serving the American people abroad in foreign affairs. As of May 2021, there were 321 plaques with names going back to 1780.

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Perishing for Lack of Knowledge

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Back in the early 2000s, WiRED’s Community Health Information Centers (CHICs) in Kenya were outfitted with desktop computers, CRT monitors (state of the art at the time) and an extensive collection of CD-ROMS stocked with health information. Initially, we offered information mostly about HIV/AIDS, which at the time was rampant throughout Africa and much of the world. It plagued men and women alike, and in countries throughout East Africa, it devastated entire villages, taking out large swaths of a community, leaving behind only the very young and the very old.