2016 Peacemakers of the Year Award
Posted by Laura Farmer Sherman on Mar 04, 2016
On February 24, 2016, Steve Brown and Fary Moini, both from the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club, were named the San Diego Downtown Breakfast Rotary Club’s 2016 Peacemakers of the Year. They are pictured here with Sandra Schrift, our club’s Pathways to Peace Chair.
“As Jonas Salk said, ‘Hope lies in dreams, imagination and the courage of those who dare to make dreams a reality,’” remarked Sandra. “Steve and Fary demonstrate, at the very highest level, our Rotary value of Service Above Self.”
Longtime Del Mar resident Brown has been involved in peacemaking at many levels – helping to place scholars from India, Uganda, Eritrea, Kenya, China and Afghanistan into the Conflict and Resolution Master’s program at the Joan Kroc Center for Peace and Justice. He recently helped charter new Rotary clubs in Jalalabad, Afghanistan and Homa Bay, Kenya. In fact, he serves as Rotary International’s Special Representative for Rotary to Afghanistan while volunteering on over 40 local projects there.
Brown and Moini spearheaded building a school in Jalalabad that houses more than 4,000 children. Together, they have also formed important alliances with Nangarhar University, located just outside of Jalalabad, Afghanistan. They created a female dormitory and a satellite-based computer lab there. They also established the Jalalabad Female Sport Association to show women the importance of movement and exercise.
And now, they are expanding their work in Afghanistan to help the medical community there save women’s lives by facilitating the donation of and training for an innovative cellphone enabled mobile “colposcope,” which is a magnification instrument. Tel Aviv-based startup MobileODT makes and sells a small, easily portable, and relatively inexpensive version of this device, which uses smartphone technology. Essentially, the colposcope attaches to a smartphone for use in a cervical exam. The device might never have reached the Afghan city of Jalalabad, on the border with Pakistan, had it not been for Moini, an Iranian-raised former nurse.
“Cervical cancer is responsible for the deaths of more than 270,000 women annually, about 85 percent of whom live in low- or middle-income countries, and it is a leading cause of death in developing nations like Afghanistan,” said Moini, who has been to that country more than 25 times since 2002 while representing the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club.
Moini flew to Tel Aviv in November 2015 to be trained by MobileODT in how to use the mobile colposcope, then flew to Turkey to share her training with four female Afghan doctors and a technician and to give them cancer screening devices for two hospitals in Jalalabad, along with donated fetal monitors from another company.
“Our smartphones have become so commonplace that most of us don’t think about the power we hold in our pockets,” said Brown. “These small machines have very sophisticated built-in imaging technology in the form of cameras. The colposcope wand fits into a smartphone.”
Ultimately, Moini says, it comes down to one simple concept: “Rotary is making it possible for smartphones to save women’s lives. And that is the best PATHWAY TO PEACE.”