SEX . . . education.

Well Friday was an exciting day. We had a sex education class and then in the afternoon talked about STD’s (sexually transmitted diseases). After that we had a quiz on the week’s lessons. I think the students where all exhausted by the end. In their culture sexual issues are not discussed much and even less in their mostly conservative Christian villages. The down side to this is there is a lack of factual information and a lot of misinformation. We did our best to keep it factual and scientific based but honestly we were shocked at some of the answers we got from some of the students. This is a very delicate subject and we do not want to project our cultural beliefs on them only teach the scientific truth. We deferred many of the controversial social sex questions to the Pastoral staff to follow up on in the next few weeks. To the pastors-Good luck with that, you guys! Some of this is not appropriate to repeat on the blog but to give you an example, when we polled them with the Audience response system we found that 7.69% of the students believed it was a sin to talk about sex! These are important issues and as a health care professional you need to be able to talk about medical sexual issues in a mature and educated manner with your patients. This explains why out of 3383 combined patients seen by the Barefoot Drs in the last year only 2 cases of STD’s were reported! Something is very wrong with this, statistically speaking. The Data we collected is the reason this issue came up in the first place. Had we not had the student keep logs and had we not collected and analyzed the data, we would never had realized this weakness in the Barefoot Drs. Now it has been addressed and we will follow up on it to make sure they are equipped to deal with the tough issues that may come up with future patients.

We had a special treat on Friday at break when we were able to Skype with Pastor Jon Ulm.

He is a huge asset to this Barefoot Drs program and is a critical component to setting this up every year. He will be joining us over here in a few weeks and hopefully he will be one of the pastors that will help follow up on the biblical teaching surrounding sex education and social issues that came up during our medical teaching. Here is a picture of Pastor Ulm talking to the students via the Internet. It was a big encouragement for the students and I believe for Pastor Ulm as well.

We also said goodbye to Dr. Charles Steinberg. In this picture you see Dr. Steinberg on the left, Rick Astone PT in the middle, and Dr. Bjorn Nilson on the right. Dr. Steinberg was a great help and we were blessed to have his expertise on some of the difficult subjects of this week.

We do have a prayer request. One of our students, Chan Ku Sar, had to be taken to the hospital last night for an appendicitis. He has already had surgery and is recovering fine so far. Please keep him in your prayers. Also pray for safety and good health for the rest of the students and staff.

I will try and post more over the next few days.

Rick