ISU student calls on community to ‘promote health and wellness’ during annual MLK celebration
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POCATELLO — Students, staff and members of the community marched across a college campus Monday in honor of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
The crowd of around 50 people started the march at the parking lot of the Pond Student Union Building on the Idaho State university campus and then ended at the alumni center. There, they joined a larger crowd and listened to faculty and students deliver speeches.
Those who spoke centered their remarks around a statement MLK once made about healthcare: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.”
Jones Asiegbu, president of the Public Health Student Association, is particularly passionate about this subject. He feels preventative healthcare is important for a strong community and he wanted people who heard his speech to embrace that idea.
“We all gathered together to talk about things, but how about action?” Asiegbu told the crowd.
Asiegbu grew up in Lagos, Nigeria in West Africa. The area is commonly known as a place with low quality healthcare and infrastructure, he said, but his community has an advantage.
“Whenever there is an act to improve the health care and wellbeing of people, the community jumps in together and performs that act,” Asiegbu said. “That is the power of what the community can do.”
Asiegbu’s grandmother is more than 100 years old and her memory, he says, is “as sharp as a nail” because she understands the importance of taking care of her health.
“We have the power to make that change in our community. We do not have to rely solely on public health programs, Asiegbu said.
To do this, Asiegbu said people have to mobilize their neighborhoods and communities to focus on new healthcare prevention plans.
“Where I grew up, every last Saturday of the month, everyone in the community comes out to clean the drainage system to sweep or repair the levies. The community is clean. We did not depend on the governments to come and do something,” Asiegbu said.
Asiegbu invited the audience to become their own “center for disease prevention.”
“Teach your children the importance of health and safety. Promote health and wellness in your workplace,” Asiegbu said. “I believe the power is in you and that you can do it.”
During the event, organizers collected donations for Benny’s Pantry, a food bank on campus catering to the student population.