THE STORY BEHIND CROSS CULTURAL CARE

Cross Cultural Care (C3) was founded in 2010 by Dr. Robert Charles Montana III, an American Emergency Medicine physician who has spent more than a decade working in Alaska as an ER doctor in the summer months and volunteering the rest of the year in natural disasters, refugee camps, war zones and humanitarian medical missions. Among others, he has been part of humanitarian medical teams in Syria, Gaza, Palestine, Philippines, Pakistan, Guatemala, Haiti, India and Liberia. While volunteering a year in India, he saw the value of training, mentoring, and encouraging growth of skills as a more effective strategy toward lasting change and to improve health care access.

While volunteering in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, Dr. Montana had the opportunity of witnessing the devastating consequences that 14 years of civil war had left behind. The country's infrastructure and human resources had been decimated; there were less than 50 trained doctors to address staggering health care needs for a population of over 4.5 million. Dr. Montana identified a 40 bed government referral hospital that was intended to provide free services to people living in Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia.. When Dr. Montana visited this hospital, located in a town called Robertsport, he found that there was no dedicated physician and only one mid level provider for a population of 130,000. Therefore, in March 2011, C3 began assisting this hospital by sending doctors, nurses, and mid levels to come for four weeks or more at a time to assist in training and taking care of the local population. C3 entered into a formal partnership with the Ministry of Health (MoH) of Liberia to provide these services. As C3 grew, the importance of education capacity in Liberia became apparent as well as the fact that most of the best and brightest of Liberia leave their rural communities to further their education in the capital but rarely leave to go back to their home villages thus the academic scholarships in healthcare and education were created in which all scholars work back in their home county for three years in the public sector.