Week two completed!

This week’s highlights.

Dr. Nilson also made a point with a tee shirt that read, “ Where you live should not decide if you live or Die!” He was emphasizing how important and doable preventative health care can be, particularly with children. The Barefoot Drs can save many more lives preventing disease than simply by treating sick patients.

It has been another busy but great week. There are a few highlights I did not get a chance to tell you all about on the Blog.

One is that we have a new toy. Bjorn ordered an Audience Response System for us to use with the students. There has been a bit of a learning curve for the students and for us but it promises to be a huge help. It is basically a radio frequency receiver that hooks to your computer with a program for collecting data. Each student gets a small hand held clicker. We project a question on the screen with multiple choice or true / false questions and the students can answer with their remote clickers. This way we know what the individual students know, not just the class collectively. We get the data instantly and can immediately show it in graphs or charts on the screen for all to see.

This brought up an interesting problem for us. The students were very confused when we would ask them a negative question like “What is not the right answer?” Evidently, most of them have not been exposed to these types of questions before. This is something we did not realize until now, and it is very important because as Westerners we talk like this often. So many times in the past when they were confused it may not have been the subject matter but the way the question was presented that was the problem.

Another highlight was on Friday when we decided they needed more practice on paperwork and how to actually take care of a patient from start to finish. They had significant difficulty with this. We had them break into small groups then take a history and exam on an actual patient (one of the students with severe abdominal pain). We then projected one of their field patient log forms on a white board and had them fill in the blanks so then we could all see and ask questions. This was great practical practice on how to see a patient and use the form. They had quite a bit of difficulty with this. It took at least two hours to go through what we thought would be a fairly simple exercise. Again, we as Westerners take too much for granted. One of the translators told me that often in Burma they are not taught critical thinking. In many classrooms you do not ask questions and you only give the right answer. You definitely do not question the teacher. We are asking them to do all of these things, but we have realized we must first teach them how to do them.

Here is Abraham (one of our translators) helping to fill out the projected log form.

In this picture Thin Bey is summing up the conclusion on the patient and what drugs to use. The patient has a 5 yr history of stomach pain and the problem is likely an ulcer. We expect him to start feeling better by Mon.

The students have been continuing with their presentations. Here is Zimi Ram presenting on the eye.