Nearly five years ago, 
University 
of 
Michigan 
faculty and students and 
the Grace Girls’ Home in 
Trincomalee, 
Sri 
Lanka 
teamed up to tackle diabetes 
care in low and middle-
income communities. Now, 
organizers reflect on the 
new mentorship programs 
taking place within the 
initiative. 
Grace Girls’ Home is a 
shelter for “at-risk” girls 
and the elderly displaced 
by the 2004 tsunami in 
Sri Lanka that claimed 
40,000 lives, as well as 
the Sri Lankan civil war 
that ended in 2019, which 
resulted 
in 
more 
than 
100,000 deaths. The shelter 
provides 
residents 
with 
housing, food, education 
and medical treatment as 
necessary. 
Dr. Naresh Gunaratnam, 
a 
gastroenterologist 
at 
Huron 
Gastro 
in 
Ann 
Arbor, founded Grace Girls’ 
Home in 2002, intending to 
address the needs of girls. 
In 2004, he started an 
elder care facility to house 
elderly people who had no 
children left to take care of 
them.
“There’s 
no 
place 
to 
discharge them, so they 
would literally give them 
a mat and sleep on the 
grounds of the hospital, 
and the hospital would do 
their best to feed them,” 
Gunaratnam 
said. 
“You 
start accumulating a lot of 
these elders who had no 
place to go … At our best in 
2004-2005, we were taking 
care of 300 people.”
Grace Girls’ Home also 
provides 
residents 
with 
vocational 
training 
and 
skills 
after 
they 
leave 
the home. Sahr Yazdani, 
University 
alum 
and 

medical student at Loyola 
University 
Chicago, 
started helping out at Grace 
Girls’ Home when she was 
13 by tutoring the girls 
in 
conversational 
skills. 
Yadzani said this helped 
her realize the importance 
of the girls’ transitions 
from home.
“I 
realized 
there 
wasn’t really a transitory 
environment for these girls 
living in the orphanage 
to living in Sri Lankan 
society,” Yazdani said. “We 
renovated these complexes 
that were existing on the 
Grace Girls’ home property 
… and wanted the girls who 
were older to live in this 
transitionary environment. 
We taught them financial 
literacy and how to go into 
the market and everything 
… just to introduce those 
ideas in conversation and 
such.”
LSA senior Nikita Bazaj 
is the president of Grace-
Edu, an organization on 
campus that focuses on 
introducing these life skills 
to the girls at Grace Girls’ 
Home.
“We’re 
doing 
a 
mentorship program with 
students at U-M and the 
Grace Girls who are in high 
school,” Bazaj said. “We’re 
putting 
two 
U-M 
girls 
with one girl from Grace, 
and the fall semester was 
focused 
on 
building 
a 
relationship with the girls 
and this next semester will 
be focused on teaching 
the girls individual team 
topics. We have a different 
team topic per month and 
for 
example, 
this 
first 
month’s is finance.”
In addition to learning 
life 
skills, 
University 
fellow 
Anjan 
Saha 
has 
helped implement a recent 
program to offer the girls 
at Grace Girls’ Home new 
employment opportunities 

as 
community 
health 
workers. 
Saha 
said 
ancillary 
care 
providers 
aren’t always as trusted as 
physicians in Sri Lanka. 
“A 
lot 
of 
trust 
is 
concentrated 
with 
the 
physician,” 
Saha 
said. 
“Ancillary care providers 
don’t necessarily receive 
that same level of trust. 
That’s obviously a very 
big 
component 
of 
our 
healthcare 
system 
and 
it allows the system as a 
whole to offload some of 
the workload that would 
otherwise 
fall 
under 
the responsibility of the 
physician.”
Grace 
Girls’ 
Home 
has also partnered with 
the 
William 
Davidson 
Institute 
in 
the 
Ross 
School of Business, a non-
profit organization aimed 
at improving the delivery 
of 
care 
in 
developing 
countries. 
Gunaratnam 
said 
together, 
they 
will 
improve 
physician 
efficiency in Sri Lanka.
“When we can’t create 
more physicians, we have to 
make them more efficient,” 
Gunaratnam 
said. 
“The 
physician’s role is to deal 
with the people who are 
at most risk for dying … 
We are saying instead of 
90 
seconds, 
give 
those 
patients five minutes.” 
In August 2018, Medical 
student Monica Choo went 
to Sri Lanka to help set up 
a study examining how 
effective the community 
health 
workers 
are 
at 
providing health care and 
patient satisfaction. 
Choo 
also 
created 
a 
curriculum to train the 
 
community health workers 
in doing their job safely 
and efficiently.
“I also created a one-year 
curriculum to train them,” 
Choo said. “Ultimately, we 
want it to be a thing where 

the girls can be accredited 
nationally and hired by the 
physicians 
and 
actually 
make a living. To do that, 
we have to have a real 
curriculum like any job. I 
took some time to create 
a 
one-year 
curriculum 
and we’re in conversation 
with US Aid right now to 
see how we can get that 
leverage and get it pushed 
through the Ministry of 
Health.”
Saha 
said 
community 
health 
workers 
help 
alleviate congestion faced 
in 
the 
health 
system 
and 
implementing 
new 
vocational skills for those 
who cannot seek higher 
education.
“As 
more 
and 
more 
patients 
started 
seeing 
them 
and 
experiencing 
what it is they had to 
offer, trust was sort of 
built over time,” Saha said. 
“Since then, the operation 
has seen maybe 400-500 
patients in a number of 
provincial hospitals within 
the Eastern province.”
Gunaratnam 
said 
the 
future implications of the 
government’s support in 
this 
new 
vocation 
will 
significantly 
improve 
patient outcomes.
“The government will 
hopefully 
support 
us 
creating this new job and 
get these girls paid and so 
forth,” Gunaratnam said. 
“We believe (in) focused 
intervention, that means 
engaging with the girls 
leads to better outcomes … 
The patients like talking to 
the girls. They give them 
more 
time, 
they 
know 
them personally, there is a 
higher level of sympathy. 
When I visited, they said, 
‘They give us good advice 
about the practical things. 
The doctor doesn’t have 
time to do that.’”

2— Tuesday, January 14, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
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Miranda Lynch, LSA senior double majoring in Spanish and Program in the Environment, works in the clinic at the Human Society of Huron Valley.

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