Speech Partnership | Eastern North Carolina Now

    "It takes me five to seven years to grow an SLP and one to two years to grow an SLPA. We need them in their communities to say 'No, this is how it's pronounced in my dialect, this is how it's said in my language,' and they can collaborate and work together to modify and adapt. We have to rely on the native speakers," Gallagher said.

    The challenges of reaching communities in Alaska that need help are staggering, Baginski said. Because most communities can only be reached by bush plane or boat, if she were able to raise the funds for a service expedition to Alaska's Aleutian Islands, it would require weeks or months of travel and she would have to bring everything she would need with her: food, medicines and likely shelter. Village residents, who are in the most need of medical and rehabilitates services, are subsistence hunters - there aren't really grocery stores.

    "There isn't a place to stay. I'd have to sleep on the floor in a school and pay $100 a night," Baginski said.

    Adding to the general lack of resources in rural areas, climate change is making a tough situation that much tougher.

    "Missionaries came in and built schools and summer camps, and villages have been set up in their summer camps, and now they're flooding due to global warming and melting of permafrost," Baginski said.

    ECU's Cox made several trips to Alaska during her time teaching SLP students and is in awe of the resourcefulness of the Alaskan Pirates. "The people of Alaska are just so much more resilient than I think anyone who's lived in the lower 48. Everything is harder there. We had a student once that lived in a small village where the internet bandwidth was rationed by the village elders. She called me and said the village elders told her to stop her schooling and asked if there was any way to let her download the lectures, which we didn't do because it's intellectual property, but for her, we made an exception," Cox said.


    Brewer said the need for speech-language pathologists is glaringly obvious, but in relatively well-resourced areas like North Carolina providers are overburdened with work.

    "Even here in North Carolina you have SLPs in the school system who have a caseload of 60 and70 students because there aren't enough speech-language pathologists in those in those positions," Brewer said.

    Gallagher said the incredible logistical challenges that health care providers, and students, face inAlaska mean rewarding overseas service experiences, like trips to Africa that her Arizona State SLP students raised funds for, aren't necessary. Instead, her Alaska students plan similar trips to the remote areas of their own state.

    "We don't need to go to Africa. Our students must pack in their own food, their own supplies, to not use up the resources in the communities we serve. It's a way of preserving what is Alaskan and what these communities need," Gallagher said.

    Cox said the bilateral agreement with UAA helps to not only get trained providers into areas of Alaska and Arizona that are desperate for help, but Greenville-based students also benefit from exposure to the realities of working with peers who are from different cultures and time zones.


    "Every once in a while people would say, 'You know, the diversity in this program isn't broad enough' and I tell them you haven't looked at the Alaska numbers," Cox said. "When I did group projects, I mixed them and they would have to figure out time zones and how to collaborate, which is essential to modern health care."