how 20,000 remarkable young people

from over 100 countries

ended up in Cuba

and are transforming health in their communities.

Ninety percent of them would never

have left home at all

if it weren't for a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba

and a commitment to go back

to places like the ones they'd come from —

remote farmlands, mountains, ghettos —

to become doctors for people like themselves,

to walk the walk.

Havana's Latin American Medical School:

It's the largest medical school in the world,

graduating 23,000 young doctors

since its first class of 2005,

with nearly 10,000 more in the pipeline.

Its mission, to train physicians for the people

who need them the most:

the over one billion

who have never seen a doctor,

the people who live and die

under every poverty line ever invented.

Its students defy all norms.

They're the school's biggest risk

and also its best bet.

They're recruited from the poorest,

most broken places on our planet

by a school that believes they can become

not just the good

but the excellent physicians

their communities desperately need,

that they will practice where most doctors don't,

in places not only poor

but oftentimes dangerous,

carrying venom antidotes in their backpacks

or navigating neighborhoods

riddled by drugs, gangs and bullets,

their home ground.

The hope is that they will help

transform access to care,

the health picture in impoverished areas,

and even the way medicine itself

is learned and practiced,

and that they will become pioneers in our global reach

for universal health coverage,

surely a tall order.

Two big storms and this notion of "walk the walk"

prompted creation of ELAM back in 1998.

The Hurricanes Georges and Mitch

had ripped through the Caribbean

and Central America,

leaving 30,000 dead

and two and a half million homeless.

Hundreds of Cuban doctors volunteered for disaster response,

but when they got there,

they found a bigger disaster:

whole communities with no healthcare,

doors bolted shut on rural hospitals

for lack of staff,

and just too many babies dying

before their first birthday.

What would happen when these Cuban doctors left?

New doctors were needed to make care sustainable,

but where would they come from?

Where would they train?

In Havana, the campus of a former naval academy

was turned over to the Cuban Health Ministry

to become the Latin American Medical School,

ELAM.

Tuition, room and board, and a small stipend

were offered to hundreds of students

from the countries hardest hit by the storms.

As a journalist in Havana,

I watched the first 97 Nicaraguans arrive

in March 1999,

settling into dorms barely refurbished

and helping their professors not only sweep out the classrooms

but move in the desks and the chairs and the microscopes.

Over the next few years,

governments throughout the Americas

requested scholarships for their own students,

and the Congressional Black Caucus

asked for and received hundreds of scholarships

for young people from the USA.

Today, among the 23,000

are graduates from 83 countries

in the Americas, Africa and Asia,

and enrollment has grown to 123 nations.

More than half the students are young women.

They come from 100 ethnic groups,

speak 50 different languages.

WHO Director Margaret Chan said,

"For once, if you are poor, female,

or from an indigenous population,

you have a distinct advantage,

an ethic that makes this medical school unique."

Luther Castillo comes from San Pedro de Tocamacho

on the Atlantic coast of Honduras.

There's no running water,

no electricity there,

and to reach the village, you have to walk for hours

or take your chances in a pickup truck like I did

skirting the waves of the Atlantic.

Luther was one of 40 Tocamacho children

who started grammar school,

the sons and daughters of a black indigenous people

known as the Garífuna,

20 percent of the Honduran population.

The nearest healthcare was fatal miles away.

Luther had to walk three hours every day

to middle school.

Only 17 made that trip.

Only five went on to high school,

and only one to university:

Luther, to ELAM,

among the first crop of Garífuna graduates.

Just two Garífuna doctors had preceded them

in all of Honduran history.

Now there are 69, thanks to ELAM.

Big problems need big solutions,

sparked by big ideas, imagination and audacity,

but also solutions that work.

ELAM's faculty had no handy evidence base

to guide them, so they learned the hard way,

by doing and correcting course as they went.

Even the brightest students

from these poor communities

weren't academically prepared

for six years of medical training,

so a bridging course was set up in sciences.

Then came language:

these were Mapuche, Quechuas, Guaraní, Garífuna,

indigenous peoples

who learned Spanish as a second language,

or Haitians who spoke Creole.

So Spanish became part

of the pre-pre-med curriculum.

Even so, in Cuba,

the music, the food, the smells,

just about everything was different,

so faculty became family, ELAM home.

Religions ranged from indigenous beliefs

to Yoruba, Muslim and Christian evangelical.

Embracing diversity became a way of life.

Why have so many countries

asked for these scholarships?

First, they just don't have enough doctors,

and where they do, their distribution

is skewed against the poor,

because our global health crisis

is fed by a crisis in human resources.

We are short four to seven million health workers

just to meet basic needs,

and the problem is everywhere.

Doctors are concentrated in the cities,

where only half the world's people live,

and within cities,

not in the shantytowns or South L.A.

Here in the United States,

where we have healthcare reform,

we don't have the professionals we need.

By 2020, we will be short

45,000 primary care physicians.

And we're also part of the problem.

The United States is the number one importer

of doctors from developing countries.

The second reasons students flock to Cuba

is the island's own health report card,

relying on strong primary care.

A commission from The Lancet

rates Cuba among the best performing

middle-income countries in health.

Save the Children ranks Cuba

the best country in Latin America to become a mother.

Cuba has similar life expectancy

and lower infant mortality than the United States,

with fewer disparities,

while spending per person

one 20th of what we do on health

here in the USA.

Academically, ELAM is tough,

but 80 percent of its students graduate.

The subjects are familiar —

basic and clinical sciences —

but there are major differences.

First, training has moved out of the ivory tower

and into clinic classrooms and neighborhoods,

the kinds of places most of these grads will practice.

Sure, they have lectures and hospital rotations too,

but community-based learning starts on day one.

Second, students treat the whole patient,

mind and body,

in the context of their families, their communities

and their culture.

Third, they learn public health:

to assess their patients' drinking water, housing,

social and economic conditions.

Fourth, they are taught

that a good patient interview

and a thorough clinical exam

provide most of the clues for diagnosis,

saving costly technology for confirmation.

And finally, they're taught over and over again

the importance of prevention,

especially as chronic diseases

cripple health systems worldwide.

Such an in-service learning

also comes with a team approach,

as much how to work in teams

as how to lead them,

with a dose of humility.

Upon graduation, these doctors share

their knowledge with nurse's aids, midwives,

community health workers,

to help them become better at what they do,

not to replace them,

to work with shamans and traditional healers.

ELAM's graduates:

Are they proving this audacious experiment right?

Dozens of projects give us an inkling

of what they're capable of doing.

Take the Garífuna grads.

They not only went to work back home,

but they organized their communities to build

Honduras' first indigenous hospital.

With an architect's help,

residents literally raised it from the ground up.

The first patients walked through the doors

in December 2007,

and since then, the hospital has received

nearly one million patient visits.

And government is paying attention,

upholding the hospital as a model

of rural public health for Honduras.

ELAM's graduates are smart,

strong and also dedicated.

Haiti, January 2010.

The pain.

People buried under 30 million tons of rubble.

Overwhelming.

Three hundred forty Cuban doctors

were already on the ground long term.

More were on their way. Many more were needed.

At ELAM, students worked round the clock

to contact 2,000 graduates.

As a result, hundreds arrived in Haiti,

27 countries' worth, from Mali in the Sahara

to St. Lucia, Bolivia, Chile and the USA.

They spoke easily to each other in Spanish

and listened to their patients in Creole

thanks to Haitian medical students

flown in from ELAM in Cuba.

Many stayed for months,

even through the cholera epidemic.

Hundreds of Haitian graduates

had to pick up the pieces,

overcome their own heartbreak,

and then pick up the burden

of building a new public health system for Haiti.

Today, with aid of organizations and governments

from Norway to Cuba to Brazil,

dozens of new health centers have been built,

staffed, and in 35 cases, headed

by ELAM graduates.