Programming Note: Damian Seal will be unable to join us on October 13 due to travel issues. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Jack Hickel, co-founder and president of the Alaska Health Project South Sudan, who will share more than 15 years of firsthand experience working with communities along the Nile River. We hope you’ll join us.
South Sudan remains one of the most challenging humanitarian environments in the world. The country continues to recover from years of civil war that internally displaced more than two million people, while communities along the Nile River have faced severe flooding for the past seven years. These challenges are compounded by limited access to healthcare, clean water, and reliable food sources, as well as ongoing political and economic instability.
Dr. Jack Hickel, co-founder and president of the Alaska Health Project South Sudan, will draw on more than 15 years of experience working with communities along the Nile River to explore the interconnected humanitarian challenges facing remote communities in South Sudan. He will share lessons from efforts to expand access to healthcare, clean water, and food security in some of the country’s most underserved areas, as well as the challenges of delivering humanitarian assistance in such a remote and difficult environment.
The discussion will offer an on-the-ground perspective on humanitarian work in South Sudan, while exploring broader lessons about community-led development, resilience, and the interconnected relationship between health, water, food security, and economic well-being.
About the Speaker
Dr. Jack Hickel is a family physician and tropical medicine specialist with more than four decades serving underserved communities around the world. His broad experience includes medicine, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics, emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and public health.
He spent 16 years in Eswatini, Africa, serving as Chief Medical Officer of the country’s largest hospital and Medical Director of a rural hospital and 16 bush clinics. He also served for several years as the personal physician to the King of Eswatini. After leaving Africa, he spent 24 years in the Alaska Native Health System.
In 2008 Dr. Hickel co-founded the Alaska Sudan Medical Project, renamed the Alaska Health Project South Sudan after the country gained independence. Working in remote and impoverished villages along the Nile River, the project is creating lasting improvements in health, clean water, food security, and community development impacting tens of thousands of people.
Program Details
- Check-in will begin at 11:30 AM with seating available on a first-come first-serve basis. The program will begin at 12:00 PM.
- The program is scheduled to be 1 hour in duration, with time for mingling and additional questions for the final 30 minutes.
- Those with online reservations do not need to present ticket confirmation at the door, we will have all confirmed attendees on a list at check-in.
- Online registration closes at 6:00 PM on October 12 or when event sells out.