Digispace News

This past Semptember, Puja Shah, a dentist at a private pediatric office in Riverside, CA., traveled to Uganda, Africa with the founder of Just Like My Child Foundation, Vivian Glyck, an organization whose goal is to alleviate the suffering of women, children, and families in rural Uganda. The organization uses an approach of deep development, which means empowering communities, village by village, to move towards self-reliance by creating their own long-term solutions to healthcare, education and microenterprise. The goal of this mission centered around healthcare and Puja was accompanied by her friends Lidia Trainer, an acupuncturist/herbologist in training who brought nutritional herbs for the patients of the local hospital, as well as Dr. David Smotrich, a well known IVF specialist from La Jolla, CA who helped with C section cases and consulted with patients.

The children of this area were in desperate need of oral health instruction/education and dental treatment, which was Puja’s role to provide while she was there. Since there was no dental clinic on site, Puja raised money for supplies via email blasts and even held a concert fundraiser with friends prior to her departure. With the help
of Amish Shah and Digispace, she raised enough funds to bring instruments and items to set up a brand new dental clinic at Bishop Asili Hospital in the village of Luwero, which will continue to survive via Dr. Jane Mandera, a recent dental school graduate of a university in Kampala, Uganda upon Puja’s departure. Puja also spent many hours visiting schools of local villages in the area to educate children on oral health instruction and providing them with basic necessities such as toothbrushes, toothpaste and floss, many of which they had never seen or had no access to obtaining.

Puja has been involved with a number of local outreach programs, but her long-term career goals include international outreach and education. She is also a freelance fiction writer and is currently working on a series of short stories based on women’s’ rights issues. She believes helping others fulfills not only her career goals, but also her spiritual goals, and thus creates a cycle of true development on all levels for everyone. She lives in La, Jolla, CA.

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