The Kosovo Connection

As a leader of the Internationa] Rescue Committee, former Dartmouth Medical School Dean James C. Strickler '5O is leading efforts to bring to war-ravaged Kosovo a range of resources—many of them from Dartmouth.

Strickler is co-chairman of the board of directors of IRC, an organization was founded in 1933 at the suggestion of Albert Einstein to help people fleeing Nazism. Strickland is helped by Georgia Travers '77 on the executive committee, Dartmouth special assistant to the president Lucretia Martin '51A as a director and William Yaggy '67 as head fundraiser.

Strickler has also inspired support from the Medical School—arranging for DMS Dean John Baldwin to tour University Hospital in the Kosovo capital of Pristina last August. "I saw pandemonium, a breakdown of cataclysmic proportions," says Baldwin. He described how doctors operated with pistols under their gowns while dull-eyed amputees bummed cigarettes near smoldering rubbish heaps. Days later, DMS Associate Dean Dean J. Sieberttoured Kosovo with the IRC to assess needs.

Now Strickler is involving DMS faculty through Friends of Kosovo, designed to develop a Pristina Hospital teaching curriculum and credentialing standards. He invited Kosovar physicians and medical students to Dartmouth in January and February, and he envisions DMS faculty and students working in Kosovo hospitals. "For us to make a difference," says Baldwin, "will require a sustained, patient, painful process of several years." Fundraiser Yaggy faces a different challenge. He must spark interest in an international organization at a time when only about 3 percent of U.S. charitable giving goes to such efforts abroad. "But

DMS Dean Baldwin, left, found that all was not well in Pristina's hospial.