Mutual Understanding, Not Pity

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Last week's visit to Harvard Medical School by medical students from Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia, was a rewarding educational experience for both parties involved. Thanks largely to our guests' remarkable fluency in English, we were able to share with them some of the innovations in our medical curriculum--both the "Common Pathway," as it is now called, and the Health Sciences & Technology (HST) programs--and learn about the challenges they face as students in a radically shifting society. Communication was truly the key to the project's success.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the Crimson reporter who interviewed me for the February 4 article ("E. Europeans Visit Med School") entirely missed the point of the project and misrepresented our motivations for inviting our Czechoslovak counterparts to this country. I was quoted as saying, "They basically said. 'We need help. We've been stagnant for 40 years.'" Our group of 15 second-year students at Harvard did not spend one year raising $10,000 to bring them here out of a sense of pity or beneficence, as that misquotation implies. We did it because they let us know that they were looking for new directions in curriculum reform, and we wanted to show them Harvard's approach. Not incidentally, we were eager to hear more about the medical student's role in the Czechoslovak "Velvet Revolution." Their stories of building occupations, midnight postering and rural information campaigns are truly inspirational.

True, their equipment is not as up-to-date, their books are on average 10 years older than ours and their lectures are more numerous and less interactive--but this does not add up to stagnation. Your reporter appears to have lapsed into the facile view that their lack of technology implies a lack of ability. We learned as much from them about the doctor's role in advocating social change as they did from us about CD4 cell counts in HIV-positive patients. The challenges they face in rationing care will soon be a reality here as well. As future colleagues, we paid their way here in order to share, not to "help" or "be helped." What is a pity is that fledgling efforts at international communication can be so easily subverted by reporterial inattention. Our guests were polite enough not to mention the insult. Your paper must. Nathanial Hupert '87-'88 Zoltan Arany '89  James Morris Andrea Cheville  Mike Murphy Carey Farquhar  Peter Nigrovic Melissa Gilliam  Curtis Page Bill Grobman  Sara Szal Matt Menard  Caroline Tsen Jose Morales  Jessica Wu   Czechoslovak Project