“We expected about twenty-five countries would respond,” says Kite (below), administrative director of the center. “In fact we had responses from at least two nursing leaders in each of more than a hundred countries.”

Following the lead of many schools at Emory which have enhanced their international outreach programs, from theology to public health, the School of Nursing in September 2000 created the Lillian Carter Center to help improve “the health of vulnerable people worldwide through nursing education, research, practice, and policy.”

The center’s programs include undergraduate and graduate training for nursing students with a commitment to global health, international academic exchanges for faculty and students, hosting international colleagues and scholars, and global health forums.

The Global Nursing Partnership conference, which will be held at the Carter Center, will bring chief nursing officers, leaders of national nurses associations, and national health care planners together from around the world. The center was named for Lillian Carter, a nurse and social activist who served in the Peace Corps in India at age sixty-eight. She died in 1983.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth E. Downes, who recently developed a nurse practitioner program in Fiji with the World Health Organization, is academic program coordinator for the center.

“It’s amazing to see the conditions under which some nurses work–minimal salaries; long, hard hours; walking three miles to work,” says Downes, who has visited nurses in Zimbabwe, Benin, and Mozambique. “But they remain tremendously caring. They are my heroes.”–M.J.L.