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...

 When people ask Lilly Markowitz what her favorite part of five weeks in Peru was, she does not hesitate.

"The people."

Not the hospital rotations. Not the community health campaigns. Not the surgery she observed or the workshops she led. The people — the doctors, the nurses, the children at El Ro...

One in four people globally still lacks access to safely managed drinking water. One hundred and six million drink directly from untreated surface sources (WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme).

Those numbers were published last year during World Water Week. They describe, with precision, a crisis...

There are roughly 1.2 billion young people between the ages of 15 and 24 living in the world today. Despite growing up in wildly different national, economic, and cultural circumstances, their underlying goals tend to be the same: dignity, real opportunity, meaningful participation, and a future wor...

Nina Paoliello is a nursing student from New York. She is also a single mother of two, returning to school later in life, and someone who has spent years working in patient care before deciding to pursue her BSN. She is, by any measure, someone who already understands what it means to show up for ot...

A new mother in a highland community outside Huancayo has delivered her baby at home. There was no lactation consultant in the room. No postnatal nurse to check the latch. No one to answer the questions that arrive in the first hours of a newborn's life, the ones that determine whether breastfeeding...

Every 30 seconds, someone in the world dies from complications related to chronic hepatitis — including cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Not because the tools to prevent it do not exist. Effective vaccines, accurate diagnostics, curative treatments for hepatitis C, and long-term therapies for hepatitis ...

In Anconcito, Ecuador, chronic child malnutrition is not a statistic that lives in a report.

It shows up in a child's height at a routine screening. In the results of a cognitive assessment. In the long arc of a life shaped, before the age of five, by what the body did not receive when it needed it...

 In 1736, Benjamin Franklin founded America's first volunteer fire brigade after a ship fire tore through a wharf, warehouses, and neighboring houses in Philadelphia. Twenty-six neighbors signed up. More followed.

That instinct, to organize, to show up, to solve a problem together rather than wait ...

Seventy-five years ago, after the Second World War, the world made a promise: people forced to flee have the right to seek safety and protection. It was never meant for a few. It was meant for all of us.

That promise has not been kept.

The number of forcibly displaced people worldwide has reached ...