One to two weeks. That's all it takes to spend part of your winter break as a medical volunteer abroad, working alongside local health teams in Peru, Ecuador, or Costa Rica.

With FIMRC's Global Health Volunteer Program (GHVP), you can shadow doctors, join home visits, teach health education to kids...

By Friday afternoon, the team had seen 588 people. Five days, five neighborhoods, one fishing town on Ecuador's Pacific coast.

That number started with a question FIMRC Ecuador asks before every campaign in Anconcito: what keeps families from reaching care in the first place?

The answers are rarel...

As told to FIMRC by Victoria Cowan

Most international health experiences hand students a clipboard and a corner of the room. You watch. You take notes. You learn from a careful distance. 

Victoria Cowan, 19 years old and from the Bay Area in California, came to Huancayo, Peru expecting something d...

A woman delivers her baby in a rural health post in Bududa. There are complications. She is hemorrhaging. The nearest blood bank is hours away, and even if a vehicle were available right now, the roads make the journey uncertain.

This is not a hypothetical. It is a scenario that plays out across lo...

A woman in Bududa has had headaches for months. She assumes it is exhaustion, she wakes before sunrise, tends to her crops, cooks, cleans, and cares for four children. She has never had her blood pressure checked.

In Huancayo, a man in his forties has not seen a doctor in years. The nearest clinic ...

712 women die every day from preventable pregnancy-related causes. Most of them never saw a doctor. Many of them saw a nurse — or saw no one at all.

In most health systems, nurses are the first point of contact — the ones who assess, triage, educate, comfort, and follow up. In low-resource communit...

There's a version of Mother's Day that doesn't make it onto greeting cards.

It looks like a woman in Huancayo walking two hours on a mountain trail to reach the nearest health post. A mother in Bududa navigating childbirth in a facility that lacks the basic equipment her situation demands. A first-...

Soap and water. That's it.

Of all the interventions in public health, handwashing consistently ranks among the most effective at preventing infectious disease — respiratory illness, diarrhea, healthcare-associated infections, even maternal sepsis. It costs almost nothing. It requires no prescriptio...

Every year, National Volunteer Week celebrates the power of service and the individuals who create meaningful change in their communities.

But for those looking to take their impact even further, volunteering abroad offers something deeper: the opportunity to support underserved communities while g...

Every April 11, Costa Rica comes alive with national pride, honoring Juan Santamaría—a young hero whose bravery helped protect the country’s sovereignty in 1856.

For participants in FIMRC’s Global Health Volunteer Program (GHVP), this is more than a cultural moment—it’s a unique opportunity to expe...