Friends Without a Border

After a year in Mandalay you facilitated English and personal courage at the Lao Friend's Hospital for Children in Luang Prabang, Laos for six months, June-December.

The hospital, a non-profit NGO based in New York, opened in 2015.

All medical equipment and medicines are donated.

Patients are low income Lao and H'mong. Many have traveled a long way in pickup trucks to try and save someone they love. The hospital treats 50-80 children a day.

Malnutrition, thalassemia, fractures, burns, rashes, infections and childhood illness are common.

Treatment, medicine and Out Reach community care is free.

Lao with money go to the Provincial Hospital next door. There, a old man relative pushes an empty wheelchair across a parking lot. Water floats on the surface of the ornate circular broken water fountain. National hammer and sickle flags hang limp. Families camp out under trees on straw mats with bags, bedding, an unplugged fan and bamboo rice baskets. Trash litters the ground.

White clouds dance with forested mountains under a blue sky in a landscape painting.

Eighty local staff at LFHC.

They call you "teacher."

You call staff "teacher."

They are surprised.

No "teacher" calls them "teacher."

You smile. You are the teacher and I am the student.

You are health care professionals. You know your job. You are learning more about your job. You know more about medicine than I do.

You are a team. You are the future of Laos.

I am here to help you. Simple English is good. My English is getting better.

You are responsible for your learning.

You smile.

You speak slowly and clearly. Pro-nun-ci-a-tion. Diction. Articulation. Intonation.

How now brown cow?

Sound by sound.

Language chunks.

"I need help," are three important English words.

Talk, share, learn and teach your partner. If you can teach it you know it.

They are doctors, nurses, lab and X-Ray techs, administration, infection control housekeepers, physical therapists, maintenance, outreach staff, anesthesiologists, and patient intake receptionists.

Together you do general and medical English. You laugh, dance, sing "I love to color," and practice meditation.

I am breathing in. I am breathing out.

Calm, relaxed heart-mind.

Beginners to  advanced practice the four skills, speaking, writing, reading and listening. I don't understand a thing please repeat.

They create vocabulary notebooks and mind maps by topics: medical equipment, illnesses, blood basics, body parts, internal organs, bones, muscles, senses, daily activities, home/furniture, adverbs of frequency, prepositions, directions, family, food, sports, free time activities, weather, time, travel, and dreams.

Staff consistency attending English classes is a challenge. Work schedules take priority.

An operating theatre and neonatal unit recently opened. Staff are busy with medical training.

The in-patient department has twenty beds. Emergency has five beds.

Foreign volunteer health care professionals come for two-four weeks. They share their specialist expertise. They return to England, Australia and beyond wild.

The hospital is in a village twenty minutes from town. The College of Science and Health is nearby.

Outside the entrance gate along a dusty road people sell grilled meat, fish, rice, fruits and vegetables to patient's families, staff, and students.

It's a 125cc motorcycle culture.

At LFHC families have lockers for food and personal belongings in a large community area outside reception. There are toilets and showers.

They use a large outdoor kitchen for cooking. They chop kindling and stoke fires for rice. They eat, sleep and talk while their children receive care.

Every Thursday the nutritionist, visa coordinator and head of infection control prepare healthy meals for the families.

Young H'mong mothers nurse babies.

Families watch comedies or nutrition education films on a large plasma screen.

People sleep on benches.

Dogs rummage through trash.

A family sitting on straw mats eats from shared bowls.

A mother holding her infant studies mirrored reflections.

A father supports a pole with an IV drip bag for his son.

Kids play games on a cell phone.

A housekeeper mops a tile floor.

A security guard dozes near pink, yellow and white orchids hanging from bamboo.

A happy girl with a bandaged leg rolls her wheelchair into the sun.

Curious eyes study a smiling stranger passing through.

He came, he helped, he left.

Friends Without A Border. https://fwab.org/

pain killers

Greetings,

Another brilliant day blooms zooms bright and infinitesimally small intense light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. You'll never catch it.

What you don't see is fascinating.

The clatter of foreign tourist utensils sing near dumb thumbed Angkor Wat guidebooks dancing with dusty beggar children hawking stories of orphanages and medical clinics.

The Children's Hospital has 22 beds in one room. They are full. They are filled with infants and children wearing air hoses in their nose. They suffer from pneumonia and tuberculosis. This is common in Cambodia. A parent holds a tiny hand.

I.C.U. has five beds. They are full.

400 mothers cradling kids wait to see a nurse. The nurse can dispense five medicines. Three are cheap generic pain killers.

Life is a pain killer.

The other two drugs are generic placeboes. The mothers are happy to get SOMETHING, anything. They have no knowledge about medicine.

One effective pill prescribed by a doctor costs $1.00. Parents need to buy 15. 

$15.00 is a fortune. Out of the question. Parents accept cheap ineffective drugs. Parents need a miracle. How much does a miracle cost?

They are hopeful. They wait. They have ridden on the back of cycles from distant villages. In their village everyone had the answer for their child's sickness. Babble voices of the old survivors. Babble voices of relatives seeking salvation inside a dance with Death.

An old village healer waved smoking banana leaves over their child running a fever. Hot and cold.

Mothers wait to see the nurse as sparrows seek water in broken light.

Metta.