Rajanikant Shankarrao Arole and Mabelle Arole

1979 Ramon Magsaysay Awardees for Community Leadership from India. Both doctors, Rajanikant and Mabelle Arole chose Jamkhed, a poor agricultural village as the site for their innovative plan to provide medical and health services to villagers in India. A remote village where only a handful cared for the health of over ten thousand people. The site, a seven-acre donated land had a cowshed and a rented hall with no electricity and running water. Through dedication, determination and with the training they had received in India and the US, they used these meager resources to start life-changing community projects for the people of the village. Donations from several organizations and foreign agencies helped the couple built a hospital, installed almost a hundred tube wells, organized community kitchens, planted thousands of trees, constructed hundreds of check dams, and cultivated 780 acres of land. The tremendous success of their efforts to combine community development with a comprehensive approach to rural health care using the Jamkhed model has been recognized by numerous international organizations.

In memory of Mabelle Arole who died in 1999, a Fellowship named after her was founded in 2001. The Fellowship is given annually to a recent college graduate to study community-based primary health care, and to live and learn in Jamkhed for a year to imbibe Mabelle’s wisdom and healing spirit.