Barefoot Doctors Training 2012 has started!

The Barefoot Dr training school has began! This is the third and final year for this group of Barefoot Dr. Students. Amazingly, all 26 of them have been able to return this year. Last year two could not make it down to Thailand. One because she was pregnant and the other because there was too much snow over the rough mountain trails she needed to cross on foot to get to the nearest town with an airport.

Dr. Bjorn Nilson and myself arrived safely in Chiang Mai on Sat and are well on our way to being adjusted to our jet lag. However, I am writing this Blog at 5:00 am and I have been wide-awake since 4:00 am. We will remain here to run the program for the entire 6 weeks of the medical portion of this training. We have been busy getting organized the last two days while a two man team of “CHE” trainers is doing most of the teaching. Despite all the planning ahead of time, some things cannot be anticipated or dealt with until we are here on the ground and face to face with people. “FLC” has been helping us get everything up and running. As we debrief the Barefoot Dr students we will finalize the teaching curriculum for this final year of training. That way we can tailor the teaching to their real life needs and wants of training based on what they have actually seen in their areas. This may be quite different for different students because they are scattered across Myanmar in a variety of settings. Some are in high mountains, others are in the lowlands, and a few are in poor towns with little or no health care.

What is “CHE?”

This first week of training is mostly CHE (Community Health Education). This is a well-respected approach to helping communities in need in a responsible way. CHE has been around many years and has helped many charitable organization be more effective and responsible in how they help. CHE focuses on the entire person. It addresses the physical and spiritual and is focused on prevention. It trains people how to help a community help itself rather than just doing it for them. The result of this approach is a much more lasting and empowering effect. So this week is really about leadership training and how to be effective at their Barefoot Drs work. CHE has time-tested, creative teaching techniques for developing communities where many of the people may be illiterate. For example, they use a lot of visual and interactive techniques, role-playing and skits, breaking into small groups and students taking turns writing answers on the large paper board in front of the room. CHE also encourages the students come up with the answers themselves, and the facilitator just guides the line of questions. It is amazingly effective and makes sense, but it is very different than how we do things in the west. You can see in these pictures some of this teaching in the first two days of class. It is Wednesday morning here now and we are off to another day of CHE.

Thank you all for your support.

That is all for now, Sincerely Rick Astone.