OCEF North America Volunteer Dr. XinShu She’s Site Visit Note (Excerpts)

“Please don’t go, please stay with us.” After auditing the health classes with my fellow OCEF volunteers at Ming Hua Primary School, these little girls grabbed my hands and wouldn’t let go. The sincerity in their innocent eyes made me so moved. I told them that the schedule was tight and I had other schools to visit. But I’d come back and visit them again. “But then when? When would you come back? Why don’t you just stay and teach us English? In exchange we may teach him Chinese (pointing to my husband J).” Sounds like a plan huh? It was hard to say no.

In the beginning of the adolescent health education class, most of the young folks were way too shy to participate in any class discussion even if they knew the answers. They were, however, very excited about the group competition. Too eager to win, they set aside the shyness and threw me a bunch of questions after the class, some even asked for my phone number. Two especially outgoing kids brought us around to the open yard behind the lecture building and entertained us with lovely modern dance. They were to show their performance to the whole school in the coming Children’s Day!
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In the rural village of Zhijin, with no high-tech to sit between the doctor and the patient, no commercialization as a result of medical insurance, and no dogmatism in medical practices, the medical profession managed to retain its purest form of ethical practice, where the patients confide in the doctor unconditionally. The degree of trust is unimaginable in most developed countries as well as in big cities of China. This could well be the ultimate pursuit of the purest doctor-patient relationship that I and my medical colleagues in the US have been working to get all along.

Vaccination is one of the most useful preventative measures for public health. It is cost-effective and produces good results. Although tears and snot are the unavoidable byproducts from the children, vaccination does work its way into lowering the public’s vulnerability to epidemics. Like Dr. Zhao always said, prevention is better than cure. Hence she would make multiple medical trips every month to ensure timely vaccination for each single kid, including those who were unable to pay visit to the clinic because of sickness or because their parents were away. The villagers’ gratitude to Dr. Zhao was hard to miss. They would always pull out the best chairs for us when we visited. They welcomed us with the best snacks and invited us warmly and persistently for lunch or dinner. It was a whole different view than the cold and sterile clinic rooms seen in the modern hospitals of developed countries.

Public health concerns were identified during our trip as well: domestic fowls (possibly with various parasites) walked their way in and out of the jungles and then the bedrooms; kids played with garbage and waste products (who then touched their face with the dirty hands); medical wastes were thrown away casually; medical clerks touched multiple medical items and different kids without sterilizing their hands; pit toilets were built by digging a trench in the ground, from which strong stench evolved out of the human waste, and worst of all probably, the liquid might seep through the soil and pollute the underground water.

Apparently there is still much to be done. And the unexploited potential in the children is our best resource for improvement. Education could be one of our most successful investments.

Dr. XinShu She

New York