Sarah Wamunyu left Africa, the only continent she has lived on,
two days ago to come to what most call the land of opportunity.
Only the land she is concerned with is the UCLA campus, and the
main opportunity that has drawn her here is the chance to master
techniques to better deal with drug rehabilitation and treatment
efforts in her home country of Kenya.
Some 200 million people worldwide use illicit drugs, which is 5
percent of the world’s population, according to the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
And that is part of the reason why UNODC initiated an
international network of drug-dependence treatment and
rehabilitation resource centers in order to create more accessible
drug-treatment services around the world.
UCLA was chosen to organize training sessions to help enhance
the preparation of drug treatment and rehabilitation personnel that
operate global resource centers, said Richard Rawson, the principal
investigator of the UCLA efforts to organize the training sessions
and the associate director of the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse
Programs, the division of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute in
charge of the project.
And while project coordinators say the task seems overwhelming,
they say they welcomed the opportunity to serve as the training
center for doctors, nurses and scholars, among other professions,
from around the world.
“We were very excited about being asked because this kind
of project has such a large, far-reaching impact,” Rawson
said.
Over the next three weeks, participants from around the world
will congregate at UCLA to train with researchers and educators
from ISAP in an effort to bring various substance-abuse treatment
and rehabilitation-intervention tools back to their home
countries.
“(The representatives) will come to UCLA to receive
attentive training and in return, from January to April, they will
become trainers for others in the resource center, which can
include nurses, doctors, psychologists, social workers and many
others,” Rawson said.
Wamunyu said she hopes the training will allow her to become a
better adviser, adding that for her region and work, the
psychosocial aspect of the sessions will be most helpful.
“Counseling and ways to motivate clients would be a very
important aspect,” Wamunya said.
Prior to becoming involved with the UNODC project, Wamunyu
worked to educate others in Kenya on HIV/AIDS prevention.
“The HIV and AIDS campaign is still somewhat related to
the work we’re doing now, because some drug use can lead to
the contraction of HIV,” Wamunya said, referring to the
shared needles often used for drug injections.
Project organizers hope to “increase more accessible
community-based treatment centers, bring drug treatment and
rehabilitation to prison settings, address drug-related HIV/AIDS
prevention and care, and create sustainable livelihood,
rehabilitations and re-integration for recovering addicts”
according to an ISAP statement.
While the U.N.’s eventual goal with the project is to
generate effective and diverse treatment and rehabilitation
intervention, the groups at UCLA plan to master the material
presented, so that they may, in turn, become trainers for a second
generation of those working at the treatment and
drug-rehabilitation centers.
“Starting in 2007, these network-trained trainers will, in
turn, disseminate their new skills and knowledge to various types
of substance-abuse service providers (including nurses, doctors,
counselors, social workers), who will then use the
capacity-building training volumes to build substance-abuse
treatment capacity within their regions,” said Anne Bellow,
the project coordinator.
The training volumes were translated into several languages and
were also created to cater to different socioeconomic settings in
order that UCLA trainers are better able to relay more applicable
material to the trainees.
The materials and training volumes contain practical
applications of treatment methods that UCLA deemed most appropriate
after spending months organizing selective material.
Training concentrations include varying topics such as screening
and assessment planning, counseling skills and detoxification
approaches.
“The UNODC has decided to set up training centers and
create a curriculum so (those working in the centers) can further
conduct training in their country to expand the knowledge of the
drug-abuse centers,” Rawson said.
“Our job is to decide what those practices are and design
training materials, so they can go home and train their
nurses,” he added.
To accommodate the large number of participants in the program,
other training centers with the same role as UCLA are situated in
the United Kingdom and Australia.
“(The project) represents a multinational effort not only
to build scientific and medical relationships, but also to foster
cooperation between a diverse cross-section of the world’s
nations,” said Valerie Pearce, a project director for
ISAP.
“In the current environment of global conflict, this
effort contributes to the establishment of long-term
person-to-person partnerships that can not only generate solutions
to substance-abuse problems, but also begin to build a foundation
for understanding and cooperation between nations with otherwise
adversarial relationships,” she added.
UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Program is not
unfamiliar with such service-oriented projects.
In recent years, ISAP has conducted cooperative research in the
Middle East. The primary goal of that substance-abuse program was
getting the Israelis and Palestinians to work together on an issue
they both shared, said Rawson.
Wamunya will return to Kenya in three weeks to begin training
others in the other psychiatric unit she works in that offers
drug-rehabilitation services.
“The drug abuse problem in Kenya has become rampant. …
Although, there has been a lot of campaigning done by U.N. NGOs and
the government, we need to campaign vigorously and create an
awareness of the problem,” Wamunya said.