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Writers Without Borders

A Conversation with Tim Brookes

by Nina L. Diamond

Three years ago, when Tim Brookes, a journalist, author, and Champlain College's Professional Writing Program Director, and Dr. Omar Khan, a physician and public health specialist, created Writers Without Borders, they declared the U.S.-based non-profit organization's mission would be to help "health professionals in the developing world write about the important and urgent issues they encounter, and to help their writing to reach a global readership."

The World's Children Online, their latest effort, brings a high-tech solution to the on-going challenge of getting the word out from developing nations.

I spoke with Tim Brookes about this innovative project that brings together the clout and considerabler esources of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on International Child Health, the passion of Writers Without Borders, and the creativity of the Champlain College Publishing Initiative.


ND: How did Writers Without Borders get involved in The World's Children Online?

TB: I was approached by the Academy to do a keynote talk at their annual convention October 2, and they said the theme is the state of the world's children. At medical conferences, individual experts get up and deliver papers.

I said, “How do you know what the state of the world's children really is? Wouldn't it be interesting if we created a mechanism so people in the developing world could write about what's really happening in children's healthcare? The publishing business in the medical field is closed to people in the developing world. Wouldn't it be interesting to see if we can open this up?”

We started a pilot program with Haiti and Bangladesh. We wanted to find out if we could create new forms of communication with the developing world. They have so few computers and high speed connections. If you're in Bangladesh, you could be working at the same problem as someone in the Philippines and not even know it. It's fragmented. And you certainly can't afford to go to a medical conference.

We created a website where we publish writing from Bangladesh and Haiti, and in the coming year we'll be creating the technology so people can submit by text through their cell phones.

We're also going to be getting in touch with schools of public health in our pilot countries to give grad students the opportunity to write about what's going on around them.

ND: What kind of response do you expect?

TB: The governments in developing countries may not want anyone writing about it.

For instance, in Bangladesh there are children working in the leather and tanning industries and it's notoriously toxic. That's not the kind of thing that is generally going to get written about. There are entrenched financial interests and national shame. That was one issue that has been written about Bangladesh.

ND: This is a real breakthrough in communicating about public health issues.

TB: We want to give a voice to people in the developing world so they can get their issues out to the West. Because of our connections to the Academy, anything that's read on our website, they can pick up and forward to their colleagues in the West.

Not only are we trying to overcome this developing world/first world divide, but also the divide that exists in medical information and publishing. The people who have the ability to publish what they're doing are a small fraction of the people working in healthcare in general. Most infectious disease is in the developing world. We want to give that a global audience.

ND: Do you screen who posts on this site?

TB: People send stuff to us and we put it up on the site. We haven't gotten to the point where we have an open source site.

ND: It has to be vetted.

TB: I would expect so, but because we're encouraging people to write, we have to work with
people who aren't trained writers, so we help them develop these pieces to be published on the site.

The site covers Bangladesh and Haiti, but we also have guest reporters/writers. We have a piece up from a writer who is in Uganda. After the conference in October, we want to expand to include more countries so by next year we're up to four or five in the program.

As this starts to gain momentum we'll hear from other countries as well, and will certainly open the door to them.

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As a journalist, columnist, essayist, and media critic, Nina L. Diamond's work has appeared in many publications, including Omni magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.
She was a regular contributor to a number of "late, great" national, regional, and newspaper Sunday magazines, including Omni; the award-winning South Florida magazine; and Sunshine, the Ft. Lauderdale (now South Florida) Sun-Sentinel's Sunday magazine.

She covers the arts and sciences; the media, publishing, and current affairs; and writes feature articles, interviews, commentary, humor/satire/parody, essays, and reviews.

Ms. Diamond is also the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers (Lotus Press) and the unfortunately titled Purify Your Body (Three Rivers Press/Crown/Random House) , a book of natural health reporting which has been a selection of The Book-of-the-Month Club's One Spirit Book Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club.

For its entire run from 1984-1998, she was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, which aired on WLRN-FM in Miami.

She has appeared on Oprah, discussing the publishing industry, but, in a case of very bad timing, that appearance was two years before her first book was published.

She has written her Much Ado About Publishing column for Independent Publisher since 2003.

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