The Listening to Dragonflies Project, organized by CSPP Professor Suni Peterson, Ph.D., is an action research project that has, over the past three years, reduced parasitic disease by 2/3 in Ha Trung, Vietnam. Professor Peterson was joined by 23 Alliant students in three different trips to Ha Trung to train the villagers on hand washing, dental hygiene and the importance of clean water.

The Dragonflies Project has also been building an infrastructure of trained indigenous people to serve as trainers and advisers for basic household health conditions and practices. The trainees spend a week learning ways to reduce parasites through sanitation, water treatment, human-animal transmission, preventing parasites in babies and pregnant women and psychological factors that promote health behavior change.

Congratulations and thank you to all of the students and faculty on this wonderful and important achievement. The Dragonflies Project has been invited to five other counties and will continue to go where help is needed.

If you would like to make a donation to this project, click here. All donations go to the village in the form of paying the indigenous health advocates for training and their visits to families.  In addition, funds are used to pay for interpreters, transportation to the village each day, assessments, translation of the assessments, follow up data collection and supplies.

For more information contact Suni Peterson at spetersen@alliant.edu.