New book!

This was on my mind for years. Can you imagine? The national medical school doesn’t have texts. It’s all ad hoc. Teachers throw material together for each class. I saw the medical library in Vientiane and the books are a mixture of French, Thai and English and a few rare Lao texts. After all the translations, you might as well be playing pin the tail on the donkey. Would you want medical care here?

I’m taking pictures at the nursing school. There’s a plastic model with removable organs. The stomach lid falls off and a woman is trying to put the liver back in, but she’s approaching it like a puzzle she doesn’t know. “Maybe if I push harder, it’ll fit in here." The liver goes every which angle to find some space.

Who can solve the puzzle? In the case of English, some of the top students in the class speak in a babble I don’t understand. They can get away with it because nobody else understands either.

In the case of math, I’ve heard teachers will give points for “4+6=11” because it’s close. Some students at the teachers’ training college are terrified to become teachers because they know how little they know. Would you want to be under the knife of a terrified surgeon looking for your liver?

A basic medical text in Lao/English doesn’t solve the problem, but English is so unavoidably necessary, we have to start here. Even when education was a bit better in the past, doctors couldn’t agree on standards because they had been educated in Rumania, Cuba, Russia or France. Nursing students feel English is essential if they want to get further education outside of Laos. It’s not imperialistic to say more current knowledge is based in the English language than in Lao. For the sake of everyone’s health, let’s hope they learn quickly.

Among the many NGOs scrambling for a corner of Laos, cleft palate and cataract surgeries are probably the most easily funded. I did my best to appeal to one organization in the past to focus on producing medical texts rather than swooping in and out for intensive care. Texts are not glamorous and I got no response.

Now, I am blessed to be working with Health Leadership International (HLI) based in Seattle. They’re all about education, capacity building and leadership and are not shy to invest in producing texts, no matter how daunting that task is.

I’ve also found a doctor sent from the heavens in Savannakhet who has diligently proofed and translated the text. Thanks too for all the people who let me take photos even though they probably felt really rotten.

So here is the book. A primer, but hopefully a promise for more to come.