Rural Health Clinics

American women;  think you’re tough, eh?

Can you guess what’s behind this door at a health clinic in the Vietnamese countryside? 

(As always, be sure to click on a photo to see the full sized version.)

It’s a birthing room, and if you were the wife of a typical Vietnamese farmer, you would give birth to all your children in this room – and your neighbors and friends will have their babies there too.  You will be attended by a midwife who has received nine months of training.

And – the water used in the birthing process and to wash your new baby would come from this.

Or maybe you’re an old man, injured while working in the fields.  A doctor or nurse would bind your wound and care for you – but who knows the quality of the water being to clean the wound.  Maybe it came through a garden hose to a bucket from a well near a toilet.

Moms around the world want the best for their children.  Often, the clinics are the only readily available source of healthcare for rural families.  The provincial health authorities made it a priority to have one physician at each clinic, and that alone raised the level of care considerably.  The next obvious step is to provide good resources to those doctors, and MEDRIX partners with the government to do that.

I could make this posting really dull by showing you more pictures of wells, UV safe water units, latrines, sinks, and pipes.  But, what we’ve been about the past two weeks is not about things, but people.  Here they are.