Bridging the Divide, Saving Lives

Two Wilmington women, Donna Flake and Diane Darrow, help save lives of those 5,000 miles away in Eastern Europe by providing access to critical medical texts. It began when Flake befriended a neighbor who had fled his home in Latvia during the Soviet occupation. She had a chance to visit Latvia and collect some photographs and mementos for her neighbor from his former house in 1999 while on a conference trip as the director of the South East Area Health Education Center (SEAHEC) medical library.

Her translator on that trip invited her to the National Medical Library of Latvia where Flake was stunned. The building was in disrepair, all of the materials were in Russian and dangerously outdated. Fortuitously, the International Medical Library Association called Flake soon after about a new initiative to help a needy library anywhere in the world.

“The hair stood up on my arm,” she said.

Through that initiative, Flake launched the international partnership between U.S. and Latvian medical libraries. In 1999, another fortunate event occurred: North Carolina entered a bilateral agreement with the country of Moldova as part of the State-to-State Partnership program to assist countries in the former Soviet Union. Flake was invited to speak to a delegation of representatives from Moldova when they visited Raleigh about the neighboring Latvian medical library program. After her talk, Moldova’s Minister of Health asked her to help his country as well.

Back in Wilmington, Dr. Mark Darrow became president and CEO of SEAHEC.  And, Flake recruited his wife, Diane Darrow, who is a medical research professional of Ukrainian descent, to be the volunteer coordinator for eastern European medical libraries in 2006. The two women brought numerous libraries and vendors on board including 12 North Carolina medical libraries, which made books and databases available to the Moldova library. Then, they spent a week in Moldova organizing materials and training professionals.

Since then, their efforts have yielded scholarships for Moldovan librarians to attend international conferences and the Moldovan-North Carolina Partnership arranged a study tour of medical libraries here. In 2007, Dr. Darrow accompanied them to Moldova and taught two courses. They are continuously raising funds and have gained support from local groups such as Wilmington East Rotary. Overall, they have sent 40,000 books and journals. And, they will send the next shipment of 7,000 books and journals in October.