Re: It takes a classroom to raise a village?

From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sat Mar 22 2003 - 16:39:34 MST

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    Lee Corbin wrote:

    > Spike:
    >
    >>The locals often turned out to be unsuitable
    >>construction workers: they had a far too casual
    >>outlook on life, wouldn't show up on time, wouldn't
    >>show up consistently, would wander off the job...

    >> ...Often the result is much mutual frustration.
    >
    > So we are compelled to imagine how we would feel in
    > the shoes of the villagers with their "limitations"...

    Ja, and part of the problem was that the culture
    clash was exaggerated greatly by the medical students
    being preselected from the type-A super achiever
    types. One can imagine the get-it-done-NOW types
    trying to work with those who had lived the same
    way since prehistoric times.

    The villages where they were trying to set up shop
    were in the waaay outback. It seems logical to
    imagine those villages suffer multi-generational
    brain drain in Africa the same as we discussed
    happening in rural America: those with talent,
    ability and get-up-and-go, do exactly that. They
    learn English or French, then leave for the city,
    never to return. One can scarcely blame them.

    One of the lessons learned by my missionary friends
    was that going into the remote villages was simply
    too ambitious. The medical students would do better
    by setting up shop in the middle of the most modern
    African city, train the locals in medical technology
    and send them out instead.

    > Sometimes they'd have to sit you
    > down in a chair and practically brow beat it into
    > you.
    >
    > The most frightful part is that they would be
    > absolutely right...

    Well, partially right. The missionaries had imported a
    bunch of building materials for the clinic since
    that cannot be practically built from the available
    indigenous materials: western doctors cannot perform
    surgery unless they have cleanroom conditions,
    otherwise the risk of infection is too great.

    On the other hand, the Africans generally had no
    immunity to antibiotics, so they were highly
    effective. Perhaps they could do some limited
    surgery in less-than-optimal sanitary conditions,
    I suggested, along with liberal use of antibiotics,
    thus obviating the need for all the expensive block
    and other materials.

    In response, the father of my girlfriend made an
    interesting comment. He said that the sturdy
    building materials were mostly to protect the medical
    supplies from theft.

    My notion: instead of building a clinic in place,
    to build a railroad and set up a box car as a
    rolling clinic, this kind of structure being
    inherently secure.

    spike



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