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.

New Partnership with mPower Dentists!

We are very excited to announce that we are entering a new partnership with a dental ministry based in Louisville, Kentucky. It's called mPower and their teams travel the world doing short-term training programs of indigenous Christian workers in both dental and medical services.

Burmese Evangelist Timothy and Jon Ulm attended the Global Health Missions Conference at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville back in November of this year. At the conference, God led us to Dr. Charlie Vittatow and Linda Webster and others of the mPower mission. We began telling them about our need to have dentists come to help with our training. We told them how critical this training is to the ministry of our Barefoot Doctors, but that we were becoming anxious about being able to find someone to train our students in basic dental skills before they graduate in March. Their response gives us no doubt but that God is putting our two ministries together!

Since November we have been in close contact with Linda Webster of mPower to better understand their training methods and to work out the details for them to fit into our schedule. It is obvious God wants this partnership to happen, and we can already see that the three mPower dentists who have committed to coming to Chiang Mai are going to be a God-send to our program. In addition, we have another dentist coming from Denver that same week, Dr. Robert Gardiner, who will help with the training also.

The picture at the top of this post shows mPower dentists doing this kind of training elsewhere. If you want to know more about mPower, please visit their website at: http://www.mpowerapproach.org/

You can also watch the following video online: http://youtu.be/0x73Sje-eow?hd=1

We are busy raising funds for the training modules that will be used by mPower while they are with us. These include the dental tools and supplies our students will take with them when they return home to Myanmar. We want to supply each of our 26 students with the tools and supplies they need, but that will cost $25,000 or more! Since we are already scrambling to have the funds necessary to bring these students to Thailand and keep them there for 8 or 9 weeks, this is a very big challenge!

Please consider making a donation to Frontier Labourers for Christ, earmarking your gift for the Barefoot Doctors program. The address for our treasurer is in the sidebar of this blog. Thank you for your gifts and for your prayers!

Year Three is Just Around the Corner!

Every winter, FLC holds a medical training school for village leaders from the most remote parts of Myanmar where there are no medical facilities. In each of three consecutive years, students receive six weeks of medical and dental training before graduating.

The third year of training for the 26 students you see pictured above will begin at the end of January. Then graduation will be on March 3, 2012.

At the Barefoot Doctors School, physicians, dentists and other health care professionals from America and Europe train village leaders how to perform diagnosis and treatment of tropical diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, and to provide dental care. Trained leaders are then sent back to their villages with medicines and supplies provided through FLC. Over 180 trained Barefoot Doctors have been credited with saving thousands of lives and opening doors for evangelism in otherwise closed regions.

Our Barefoot Doctor students are from nine different ethnic peoples in Myanmar (Naga, Ngochang, Rawang, Lahu, Akha, Mru, Kachin, Lisu, and Chin) and from five different states. They are already employed in many different occupations (Bible translators, pastors, youth ministers, evangelists, Sunday School teachers, music composers, government officials, educators, office workers, and farmers), but their new medical skills will open new doors for sharing Christ with their people.

Pray for their medical and spiritual ministries this year to the desperately sick and disheartened people of Myanmar!

Look at those teeth!

Meet the kids of Huai Biong School. They have great looking teeth, don’t they?

This was not the case just one year ago. Last year our medical team took a weekend trip to visit this small village school. We wanted to get a better idea of what life in a remote village was really like. Huai Biong village does now have a paved road and it got electricity a few years ago, but life here is still much the way it was before these additions. They still cook over an open fire inside their houses. They still sit and sleep on the floor. They did put in an outhouse with a toilet seat just for western guests but that was about as modern as they got. On our trip a year ago we also took a look at the health of the village and gave health related advice. We asked to see the top 6 worst

medical complaints of the children first. I am not sure what we expected but it was not what we actually got. All 6 worst complaints of the children were dental! On that trip we had an ENT resident, a pediatrician and global health expert, and a physical therapist but no dentist. As we tried to understand the problem better we realized the problem was much more basic than ever crossed our minds. As it turns out most if not all the children had dental complaints. So we asked, “How often do they brush their teeth?” We got a blank look coming back at us. Our first thought was poor translating but we then realized they had no clue about brushing their

teeth! We asked, “How many have tooth brushes?” and only a handful of 50 kids even owned a toothbrush! We immediately assembled all the children and the teachers and gave a talk on the importance of brushing your teeth and what food should be avoided and so on. When we returned home I printed out copies in Thai on dental hygiene in a village setting and sent it back to the village with 50 toothbrushes. The teachers were given instructions and were to teach all the children.

On this years trip I did not have time to go to this village myself but I had one of the locals, Pastor Suradet, who goes to the village regularly, take pictures and deliver some donated school supplies to them as seen in this picture.

He assured me the children brush their teeth every day and have virtually no dental complaints this year! Praise God for this unexpected but very necessary interaction and that we were able to be a part of it!

The problem we stumbled onto can be a common one in the developing world. You see, when a people eat all home grown foods there is little need for tooth brushing. Usually a village people will use some sort of fibrous branch to clean their teeth from time to time and there are substances they can use in place of toothpaste like ashes for one. The Main problem for these kids was modern processed food and the dreaded Soda Pop! Now they have a road so people have easier access to processed crackers and cookies and other foods that are much harder on teeth than home grown food. Soda is absolutely the worst! But no one educated them on these things and of course the soda does not come with a warning label (although I personally think it should). Take a look at these awful teeth from last years trip.

Also of note were the bags of school supplies the teachers were holding in some of the pictures. I was assigned to deliver as many of these supplies to needy children as I could take to Thailand. A wonderful family in California felt prompted to send these supplies with me after seeing pictures from last year. The supplies consisted of pencils, colored pencils, home made note pads with pictures on them, pencil sharpeners, scissors, crayons, some hair ties and a jump rope. These were a huge blessing and help to this poor village school. As you may notice in some of the pictures they do not have much and every bit helps. Perhaps this small gift of supplies will have as meaningful of an impact on these children as the toothbrushes. I hope to check in with them again next year.

Final days and closing Celebration

Well Bjorn and I made it back to California but we are not quite recovered from our trip yet. It takes awhile to get back into the swing of things after being in a different culture so long. Not to mention the time difference. Thailand was 15 hours ahead of California time. All that aside, the last week was so busy in Chiang Mai that I did not get a chance to update all of you on all the activities. I plan on catching up on my Blog posts and doing some summary reports over the next few days. There were some notable events and thoughts that should be shared.

In the last week I had a chance to teach the Barefoot Drs. about low Back pain. This is a big problem all around the world and a very popular subject for the students. In a class this size there is usually someone with actual back pain so once again we used a real life patient to do the training. Fortunately, the patient responded well to treatment and was the perfect example for this condensed P.T. course. Thanks to Bob Bowling for getting a picture of me teaching.

Of course, there is always a celebration when the Medical portion is completed. This involves, food, singing, lectures, and sometimes theatrics. Between Pastor David Tucker from England

and Dr. Bjorn Nilson there was no shortage of drama in the speeches this year. In this slide you can see Dr. Nilson demonstrating how last year the students had commented that the Barefoot Drs training had “Opened the door” for them. Dr. Nilson went on to say this year the second door had been opened.

The Barefoot Dr. students themselves sang some great songs and had some very powerful speeches and testimonies. I will point out that the Barefoot Drs students singing in this picture were barefoot.

One of the students named Peram gave his testimony. I asked him to write it down so I can share it accurately with all of you. He tells an amazing history of how the Barefoot Dr. program transformed the health of his remote village back in the 1990’s and how important this program is today. In just his village the Barefoot Drs cut the death rate from around 35 people to around 10 people per year. This progression happened over about 7 to 10 years but has maintained this improvement since the 90’s. He did make a point to say that they need to have medicine to do their jobs. I believe this was intended for the western medical and mission leaders present because the funds were short last year and they received very little medicine from the mission. This year things are looking much better but the Barefoot Drs in the field need to be resupplied due to the shortfall of last year. I know we have enough funds to get them all some medicine but we are still underfunded to meet our goal and cover all the costs of the training program itself. If you intended to donate and have not done it yet, it is not too late and any amount goes a long way in this program. You can send donations to:

Frontier Labourers for Christ

Barefoot Drs program

P.O. Box 630382Highlands Ranch, CO 80163

There are still a few more Blog entries to come. I am waiting to get back our student survey forms to get some good statistics for you all. So stay tuned and May God Bless you all.

Thank you again for all of your prayers, encouragement, and financial support. It takes all parts of this body working together to have it function properly.

Rick Astone, PT

Final exam and Leprosy.

Today we had the final exam for this year! Just look at the concentration on the student’s faces. We also handed out course evaluations for the students to grade and give input on how we did. We will find out the results tomorrow.

In the afternoon we had our final guest teacher, Dr. Trevor Smith. He is an Australian born doctor who has lived in Chiang Mai about 35 yrs. He is one of the leading experts on Leprosy. 10 yrs ago he was seeing 200 new cases of leprosy in Thailand every year. This last year he saw 15 new cases in all of Thailand.

Now Burma is a different story. Burma is considered one of the active leprosy areas although no one can get accurate figures out of that country. We

polled our students using the Audience Response System (this is kind of like voting on American idol) and found out instantly that about half of the students have someone with leprosy in their area. Two of the students said they know of new leprosy patients in this last year! These numbers are disconcerting because leprosy is a contagious disease, but it is also totally curable if you catch it early. This is one of those diseases that should not still be a problem anywhere in the world today. Fortunately Leprosy does not effect everyone but the people most at risk are those who are unhealthy or malnourished to begin with. So in countries where health conditions are poor it can be a bigger problem. Now that the Barefoot Doctor students know how to identify and treat it if necessary, there is new hope for those who are otherwise unreachable.

Tomorrow is our last day of teaching! Pray that it goes well and we get every thing completed that needs to be done.

The Weather is getting hot over here. It is in the 90’s and there is no Air conditioning where we teach. We tried moving to the new dorm building but it was not much better. The new dorm has smaller classroom, lower ceiling, and less ventilation so within minutes it was stuffy. Add people closer together and 90 + degrees heat and it is pretty uncomfortable. The heat is one reason we came a few weeks earlier this year and the weather has not been bad until the last couple of weeks. Once air-conditioning is installed it will be much better.

Despite the heat, things are going very well. This week I have had a chance to teach them some basic physical rehabilitation techniques. In these pictures you can see how we used bamboo to challenge their balance and then show how just a little assistance can help. The main point for rehab for the majority of disabled children and stroke victims is to help them help themselves.

The patients should be encouraged to do as much as they can on their own before they get assistance. We also when over ROM, Back Pain, and function. It turns out 16 of the 24 students have disable children in their villages so how to help rehab a CP child for example can make a lifelong improvement to the child and their family.

We also found out at least half of the students ride a motorcycle on a fairly regular basis either

as a driver or a passenger. Motorcycles are the most widely used mode of mechanical transportation. Often there is no road but you can get around by motorcycle. Even here in Thailand there are more motorcycles than cars. However, most people here do not wear helmets! One of our translators, Abraham, has had three motorcycle crashes when he hit is head but fortunately he was wearing his helmet. So to dramatically demonstrate our point we got two small watermelons from the cooking staff and put little faces on them. Then we put one of the melon heads in a motorcycle helmet and dropped it from about chest height.

The watermelon was unharmed. Then we took the melon head and dropped it from the same height without the helmet. The results were tragic for melon head as you can see from this picture. The moral of the story was you should always wear your helmet to save your life or prevent serious brain injury.