wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Chinese rural-health program trains healers of body and

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Note #8840 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05415
August 11, 2005

Soul practitioners

Chinese Christian rural-health program trains healers of body and spirit

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - At age 18, Li Enlin was dispatched by the government of Chinese
Premier Mao Tse-Tung to a thatched hut in Anhui Province in remote eastern
China, for "re-education."

	In those days of the Cultural Revolution, thousands of other Chinese
had much the same experience.

	The primitive hut was her home for three years.

	Enlin, who'd become a "barefoot doctor" after just three months of
training, had a few bottles of medicine and a few needles for acupuncture.
She had straw to stuff into the hole that was her window, to block the winter
wind. She had two buckets on a pole that she used to haul water from a well
she describes only as "far away."

	She never got a day off. When she wasn't working barefoot in the
wheat fields, she was seeing patients, free of charge: Soothing fevers.
Stopping stomach aches. Opening chakras. 

	And hoping for the best.

	When the best actually happened - when someone, or someone's pig, got
well - she was elated. To this day, she says, she has known no other
satisfaction quite like it.

	"Yes," she says, "I miss it, yes. You can really help people. The joy
of seeing a patient cured. ... It is hard not to be happy."

	That is why Enlin, now 50, supervises the Amity Foundation's
healthcare program, which trains doctors for service in rural western China -
where they do what Enlin did in Anhui Province: Provide medical care to folks
who cannot pay.

	Chinese Christians created Amity in 1985 to promote rural
development, education and social services. It a partner of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.).

	The program turns out "barefoot doctors" - a reference to Mao's rural
"doctors" that also serves as a nickname. Since 1989, Amity has trained more
than 20,000 gynecologists, obstetricians and surgeons to serve in rural
villages, each with 18 months of training. When the Chinese government began
requiring medical practitioners to have three-year degrees, Amity had to
decide whether to extend its training or try to negotiate an exception.
 
	Officials feared that "barefoot doctors" with three-year degree might
walk away from rural healthcare for more lucrative jobs in China's cities -
defeating the program's purpose. So its trainees stay rooted in the villages,
getting the extra training through correspondence courses.

	Enlin said a government official was sold on the concept after
touring a clinic one of Amity's former students was operating in his
thatched-hut-home. A sign at the door read: "For those who are poor, there is
free care. For the handicapped, there is free care. For the aged, there is
free care. For the widow, there is free care."

	"Basically," she says with a wry smile, "everybody enjoys free care."

	The house was shabby. The kids were barefoot. The living room doubled
as the examining room. The rural doc was embarrassed; because the wheat crop
had been ruined by a drought, so he was unable to repay a $120 loan he'd
obtained from Amity to stock up on basic medicines. Like most other "barefoot
doctors," he farms for a living.

	But he was at home, practicing medicine. He told Enlin, "I never
dreamed I'd be a village doctor."

	All the official said was: "We need this kind of village doctor."

	Enlin is talking quietly during a break between meetings at the
Presbyterian Center in Louisville. She is no chatter-box. She speaks
deliberately, laughs easily. In excellent English, she reminisces about her
past and brainstorms for ways to better equip future novice doctors.

	Although she learned acupuncture from her father, a pastor who needed
a second profession after the Cultural Revolution, she didn't expect to be a
doctor either. But when she left Anhui Province, she wanted to practice
medicine.

	It was a blow when her father insisted that she attend Nanjing
Seminary after it re-opened in 1981. She obeyed, but hankered for the
hands-on patient care she had found so rewarding.

	In 1987 she began directing Amity's training program for village
doctors. This, she says, is "God's call for me." She also is a pastor now,
and Amity's associate general secretary for project management. Her
professional loves are now in balance, not in tension.

	In more ways that one, she's a long way from Anhui Province.

	She doesn't miss the long nights in her hut, where she cowered alone
and afraid of the dark, singing Psalm 23 to calm herself as the wind howled
around her. Or salted pickles, a dietary staple of the very poor. Or the lump
in her throat when she wasn't sure what to do for a patient.

	She says her heart stuck in her throat once when the local Communist
Party chief pounded on her door at midnight, asking her to come treat his
mother-in-law. The asthmatic woman was so ill that the family had moved her
body from the bed to the floor - a rural ritual for people expected to die.
Enlin knew that the acupuncture points to restore her breath were in the
throat, the back - and the heart, the one involving the most risk.

	"So I tried," she says, recalling how her hand trembled as she
inserted the needles. "It was very dangerous. And, she came to life after 20
minutes. She survived four more years."

	Things didn't always go so smoothly.

	She pinned her first patient to the table with a needle, provoking a
screaming fit. That patient, however, forgot about the stomach ache that had
brought him to her door. And in an unexpectedly trusting gesture, he brought
in his pig for treatment the next day.

	Enlin often was paid in food - a few eggs or a mess of vegetables. "I
got to be famous," Enlin says. "It was cost-effective. I wasn't charging
anything."

	The current batch of student doctors are back in their home villages
now for summer break. Their assignment is to study recurring diseases there
and to figure out the cause. If people regularly have diarrhea, why? How is
the water supply? Is the water filtered? Is there a well? Standing water?
Should a pipe be sunk to channel water from a stream to the town?

	"What's common about disease isn't all chemistry," Enlin says. "There
are very practical things." She says she wants Amity's doctors to think like
public health workers - to look for ways to prevent disease.

	She hopes pastoral-care course work will become routine for Amity
doctors, so they can treat depression and other emotional disorders. "Now,
there is nowhere to go" for such treatment, she says.

	In medicine and ministry alike, she says, healing is the goal.

	"I don't there's any difference now between the two fields," she
says. "It is serving in two different ways. My experience of social work
helps preaching." She says it also works the other way around. 

	Congregations aren't meant to stay home reading the Bible and
listening to finely honed sermons, she says. She's sure about that.

	"The idea is to do something," she says, "to share the love."

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