Dr. Dodge: Passion for Health

Ethiopian schools use Amharic, the national language, as the medium of instruction up through grade four.  In the upper grades, English is the language of instruction, a practice going back to the early 1940’s when a national educational system was established.  Few instructional materials were available in Amharic at that time, so English was adopted then as the teaching language.

Today English is only used for teaching in the upper grades but it is clearly important for students to gain some familiarity with it before then, so beginning with first grade, it is taught as a second (or third) language.  This is why Project Mercy is glad to have American college students come to help.  Their teaching of English in the lower grade levels, even for short-term teaching, is of real value.

Guided by Dr. Pam Medows, Professor of Education at Taylor University, the sixteen students who came to Project Mercy for their J-term (January term) had already developed their lesson plans before coming.  Assigned as teaching teams, these teams taught small classes of first, second, and third graders in such a way that over six hundred students in those grades were rotated through all the teams during our time there. 

Three of the Taylor University students were in pre-medical or pre-nursing programs.  In addition to the teaching experience described above, these students were given the opportunity to spend four mornings at the Project Mercy Hospital to see patients in the hospital and to attend outpatient clinics as observers.  I accompanied them as a mentor.  The medical staff at the hospital consisted of a surgeon, who was also the Medical Director, and two general practitioners.

Interestingly enough, the latter were recent graduates of Gondar Medical School, where I had taught forty years ago when it was a Public Health College.  They were astonished to learn that I had taught there that long ago, but the experience of having been in the same educational location gave us a nice common bond.

I was well impressed with the skills of all the physicians.  They were gracious in taking extra time to explain their findings to us since none of us knew Amharic.  Between outpatient and surgical cases, I was able to elaborate a bit more on the findings for the pre-med students. Cases of probable typhus, tuberculosis, and rheumatic fever were similar to those I had seen forty years ago.  One case of a thirty-five year old woman with severe ascites was particularly instructive.

She presented with a distended abdomen, as if she was nine months pregnant, but she was not pregnant.  The distention was due to an enormous collection of fluid in her abdomen, the result of late-stage scarring of the liver.  In the United States, a common cause of such severe scarring or cirrhosis of the liver is chronic alcoholism.  In her case, as is often the case in Africa, it was due to end-stage Hepatitis B – a vivid example of the importance of Hepatitis B vaccine.  Sadly, it is not routinely available in much of Africa, and complications of Hepatitis B are all too common. 

In contrast to such situations, eating patterns among rural Ethiopians are healthier than is often the case in the United States.  The standard Ethiopian diet consists of whole grain foods with vegetable and lentil sauces, along with modest amounts of fruit and meat. In rural areas, the highly processed foods detrimental to health in the United States are rare.  Because of this, the Western diseases that plague us in the USA are rare in rural Ethiopia. Exercise levels among rural Ethiopians are also much better than for most Americans. While it is a privilege to bring helpful information to Ethiopia, we can also learn much from them!

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