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Imisioluwa Ibikunle of the Neuropsychiatric Hospital Aro in Nigeria, and other doctors, nurses an

Sarah Wamunyu left Africa, the only continent she has lived on, two days ago to come to what most call the land of opportunity.

Only the land she is concerned with is the UCLA campus, and the main opportunity that has drawn her here is the chance to master techniques to better deal with drug rehabilitation and treatment efforts in her home country of Kenya.

Some 200 million people worldwide use illicit drugs, which is 5 percent of the world’s population, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

And that is part of the reason why UNODC initiated an international network of drug-dependence treatment and rehabilitation resource centers in order to create more accessible drug-treatment services around the world.

UCLA was chosen to organize training sessions to help enhance the preparation of drug treatment and rehabilitation personnel that operate global resource centers, said Richard Rawson, the principal investigator of the UCLA efforts to organize the training sessions and the associate director of the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, the division of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute in charge of the project.

And while project coordinators say the task seems overwhelming, they say they welcomed the opportunity to serve as the training center for doctors, nurses and scholars, among other professions, from around the world.

“We were very excited about being asked because this kind of project has such a large, far-reaching impact,” Rawson said.

Over the next three weeks, participants from around the world will congregate at UCLA to train with researchers and educators from ISAP in an effort to bring various substance-abuse treatment and rehabilitation-intervention tools back to their home countries.

“(The representatives) will come to UCLA to receive attentive training and in return, from January to April, they will become trainers for others in the resource center, which can include nurses, doctors, psychologists, social workers and many others,” Rawson said.

Wamunyu said she hopes the training will allow her to become a better adviser, adding that for her region and work, the psychosocial aspect of the sessions will be most helpful.

“Counseling and ways to motivate clients would be a very important aspect,” Wamunya said.

Prior to becoming involved with the UNODC project, Wamunyu worked to educate others in Kenya on HIV/AIDS prevention.

“The HIV and AIDS campaign is still somewhat related to the work we’re doing now, because some drug use can lead to the contraction of HIV,” Wamunya said, referring to the shared needles often used for drug injections.

Project organizers hope to “increase more accessible community-based treatment centers, bring drug treatment and rehabilitation to prison settings, address drug-related HIV/AIDS prevention and care, and create sustainable livelihood, rehabilitations and re-integration for recovering addicts” according to an ISAP statement.

While the U.N.’s eventual goal with the project is to generate effective and diverse treatment and rehabilitation intervention, the groups at UCLA plan to master the material presented, so that they may, in turn, become trainers for a second generation of those working at the treatment and drug-rehabilitation centers.

“Starting in 2007, these network-trained trainers will, in turn, disseminate their new skills and knowledge to various types of substance-abuse service providers (including nurses, doctors, counselors, social workers), who will then use the capacity-building training volumes to build substance-abuse treatment capacity within their regions,” said Anne Bellow, the project coordinator.

The training volumes were translated into several languages and were also created to cater to different socioeconomic settings in order that UCLA trainers are better able to relay more applicable material to the trainees.

The materials and training volumes contain practical applications of treatment methods that UCLA deemed most appropriate after spending months organizing selective material.

Training concentrations include varying topics such as screening and assessment planning, counseling skills and detoxification approaches.

“The UNODC has decided to set up training centers and create a curriculum so (those working in the centers) can further conduct training in their country to expand the knowledge of the drug-abuse centers,” Rawson said.

“Our job is to decide what those practices are and design training materials, so they can go home and train their nurses,” he added.

To accommodate the large number of participants in the program, other training centers with the same role as UCLA are situated in the United Kingdom and Australia.

“(The project) represents a multinational effort not only to build scientific and medical relationships, but also to foster cooperation between a diverse cross-section of the world’s nations,” said Valerie Pearce, a project director for ISAP.

“In the current environment of global conflict, this effort contributes to the establishment of long-term person-to-person partnerships that can not only generate solutions to substance-abuse problems, but also begin to build a foundation for understanding and cooperation between nations with otherwise adversarial relationships,” she added.

UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Program is not unfamiliar with such service-oriented projects.

In recent years, ISAP has conducted cooperative research in the Middle East. The primary goal of that substance-abuse program was getting the Israelis and Palestinians to work together on an issue they both shared, said Rawson.

Wamunya will return to Kenya in three weeks to begin training others in the other psychiatric unit she works in that offers drug-rehabilitation services.

“The drug abuse problem in Kenya has become rampant. ... Although, there has been a lot of campaigning done by U.N. NGOs and the government, we need to campaign vigorously and create an awareness of the problem,” Wamunya said.