University Times

Visiting Pitt professor Robert Ali has a mission: He will leave for Aceh, a province of Indonesia, on Feb. 4 for about three weeks to assess and identify communities for aid from the Pittsburgh Indonesia Partnership Fund, established by GSPIA and GSPH.

“I’m going to scout and see what needs to be done and direct resources from the University and the Pittsburgh area,” said Ali, a visiting assistant professor in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health and director of the school’s new Center for Healthy Environments and Communities.

Ali hopes to engage the Pittsburgh area in the rebuilding and plight of Aceh communities by establishing sister city status through the Greater Pittsburgh Sister Cities Association.

“It would be nice, if two years from now, people could come from the Aceh to visit Pittsburgh.”

An emergency physician, Ali has worked in such countries as Rwanda, China, India, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. His expertise includes acute care, public health, prevention medicine and environmental health.

While in Aceh, Ali will assess where to direct money, supplies and expertise for assistance in health, education, economic development and natural resource management.

Ali is aware that local conflicts have slowed efforts to bring supplies to tsunami-ravaged communities. And he said he is wary of the precarious nature of relief efforts.

“I talked to someone in Aceh recently and I was told that reports of insurgents disturbing aid efforts and other difficulties have been exaggerated. And I think if we do good work, we will be able to stay.”

Major problems in Aceh that need addressed include dealing with the dead, the survivors, the injured plus helping to rebuild, according to Ali.

“This disaster occurred in a place where there were a lot of problems already such as corruption and armed conflict. It’s a separatist region neglected by the government. We don’t want to just bring them back to where they were; we want to bring them forward. And this is an opportunity to educate people in Pittsburgh about this situation and make them aware of the process of having a sustained commitment to a place.”

Ali spent parts of the last three years in Indonesian Borneo trying to protect the rain forest and to develop a health program for local indigenous peoples. The best approach, he said, is to work with the Indonesian government, which is responsible for the health of any given province.

“But government representatives have trouble getting out to remote areas where there are no roads”

So Ali’s approach has been to work with the government to promote community-managed health and to train people to be health advocates and educators.

Before the tsunami, the Indonesian government identified primary health concerns, based on recommendations from world health organizations, including: prenatal care, maternal and child health, nutrition, immunizations, diarrheal diseases and water and sanitation.