Charts

Dr. Bjorn Nilson worked on making these charts the better part of the weekend. They contain truly revealing and fascinating information. I think you will find them self explanatory.

Sunday!

Well it is Sunday here and that means Church. It takes the better part of a day by the time you talk to everyone and eat. Usually the church serves a great Thai lunch after service. The Barefoot Drs. are all devoted Christians and often sing songs. Today they sang a beautiful song at church. They are quite good singers in addition to everything else they do. The theme at church today was “Growing in God’s Wisdom.” I found this very fitting for the Barefoot Drs. as they are here to learn medicine but also the Bible and its teachings. In this way they are equipped to heal people physically and spiritually. In a country like Myanmar there are just as many spiritual injuries as physical. In areas of war, drug running, forced labor, and sex trafficking many of the injuries are not of the physical nature. Their country sees far more of these horrors than we can possibly relate to. All the more reason that treating the whole person, both spiritual and physical, is so desperately important.

The main verses today were Isaiah 55:8-9 and James 3:13-18. In Isaiah 55: 8-9 it reads, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.” Says the Lord. “ For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” This is a good verse to remember for our students. It reminds us that we cannot possibly understand some of the things we see happen on this earth but that does not mean there is no God. It only means that we are not that God and should not expect to understand all things as He does. All right, enough of your sermon for the day.

I have also included some more pictures from last week that I thought were good. In them you see the Barefoot Dr students have laid out object that

symbolize some of the worst problems they have

seen in the villages over this last year. It is no surprise that at the top of the list is “Bad Water.” Second is bad roads and bridges particularly during the rainy season. If the transportation is cut off that can be very serious to a village, meaning no supplies can get in or out. Third is “ difficulty getting water”. Fourth was “Mosquitoes.” Of course there is a

much larger list but we picked out the top four to discuss last week.

We should have stats up for you all soon so keep checking in.

Peace be with you all today.

Rick Astone

The First week of the Barefoot Doctors final year of training has been completed. We thank CHE and the excellent training the students received. A special thank you to David Crist and Chhuanna who “facilitated” the training. In a survey we took on Friday afternoon almost all the class said they would change some things in their community projects from last year now that they have had the beginning CHE training. That tells us it was a worthwhile experience for all of them. They learned some important techniques on how to prepare for entering a new relationship with a village and how to prepare for community projects.

For example, one technique is to write a calendar for that village. This would include what the weather is like month to month in that area, what is happening with the rice crop and agriculture each month, any festivals, patterns in illness like malaria, or anything else related to times of the year. Dr. Nilson and I also learned from this exercise and it helped us better understand the circumstances the students face. For instance, when written on a calendar it is clear to see you do not want to travel during the rainy season because the roads get bad or even impassable, the mosquitoes get worse and the instance of malaria goes way up! In some of those areas if a road gets washed out they may not be able to get supplies in or out for weeks or months! That means if you are in the village you have to stay in that area and they may not be able to get food or medicine in. There is no assistance from their government so they just have to deal with it.

We also collected all their patient logbooks and are in the process of sifting through the data. It is extremely interesting and we hope to share some of our findings next week. More than half of them saw more than a 100 patients in the last year alone! And this is before they are graduates of the program. Imagine how much more effective they will be in years to come. Most of them also worked on community development or education projects, as well, to make a real and lasting positive change in the villages. Not bad for all volunteer health care workers! I know many of you are like me and love to see statistics so we will post them when we get the data cleaned up a bit.

Today is Saturday here and Dr. Nilson and I are busy catching up on computer work, organizational issues, and going through the recently collected log book data from the students. The log book information will help us fine-tune the program to their real life needs based on their actual experiences over the last year. Through this we know how many patients they saw, what age ranges, sex, and what diagnosis they gave them. We also know what medication and how often they used it. This will help us teach and prepare them for their specific needs and help us be better prepared for future classes.

Sawadee Krap (Thai salutation)

Rick Astone

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.