Introducing a proven model
Health In Harmony was eager to accept International Animal Rescue’s invitation to partner at Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park, which lies 280 kilometers (174 miles) inland from Gunung Palung National Park, toward the center of Borneo. Despite their proximity, the two parks aren’t connected by roads. Traveling from one to the other requires two flights, a jostling six-hour drive, and a ride in a motorized canoe.
At Bukit Baka Bukit Raya, Health In Harmony’s first step was to conduct radical listening sessions in nine remote villages on the park’s border. The response was clear: To stop logging and hunting, the majority of community members said, they would need access to health care, as residents around Gunung Palung National Park had. They also asked for cellphone service, access to education for their children, and training in soil restoration techniques as an alternative to the declining yields of slash-and-burn agriculture.
Most urgently, the communities asked for midwives to provide maternal care and birth control. Women were often unable to make the five-hour round trip over rutted, muddy roads to access contraception at the nearest government clinic. These communities reported that two to three women died every year in childbirth, out of a population of 2,000.
Health In Harmony responded quickly by establishing two small health clinics staffed by two midwives and a nurse. The main Alam Sehat Lestari Medical Center supports the effort by sending a mobile clinic and a doctor or dentist each month. In June 2019, a medical doctor will begin to staff the clinic full-time.
Since the clinics opened in November 2018, they have safely delivered seven babies and treated more than 500 patients.
Vini Talenta, one of the midwives, modestly describes her work as “difficult.” The hardest part is the remoteness, she said: no cell signal, no electricity, and a day’s drive to the nearest large town. In the rainy season, floods often make the dirt road impassable.
“But now, I start to enjoy my work here,” Talenta said through a translator. “I feel grateful when I can help people heal.”
Talenta offers her patients reliable birth control pills, implants or injections, and she plans to offer copper intrauterine devices soon. She already has a growing list of interested patients, she said.
But the Alam Sehat Lestari medical team provides far more than just maternal care. During a recent mobile clinic visit — over the course of just four days — the team cared for an unconscious man in a hypoglycemic coma from alcohol consumption; a woman with bleeding stomach ulcers; a man whose finger was severed down to the first knuckle when his cow jerked the rope he was holding; a whole family with drug-resistant tuberculosis; an elderly woman with heart failure; and a farmer with a painful skin reaction to the weed killer Roundup. And that’s just a sample of the cases they’ve handled.
Prior to the arrival of the Health In Harmony clinics, many of these patients would have been forced to cut down trees in the national park to pay for these treatments and the costly transportation to a distant facility.
Margareta, a woman who has lived on the border of Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park for 20 years, says logging is common.
She said that in her community, the only three options for work are slash-and-burn rice cultivation, rubber tree plantations, and logging. “So pretty much everyone logs. We always have,” Margareta told Mongabay through a translator. “If anyone [here] tells you they haven’t logged to pay for health care, they are lying.”
This deforestation is bad news for Johnny, Sabtu, Butan, Marsela and the other orangutans in the park. And loggers risk physical injury and arrest with every trip into the park.
“Why would anyone want to do logging? It’s such hard work. If there was other work, we would definitely choose it,” Margareta said.
Health In Harmony offers an alternative by bringing care to where it’s needed and by making it affordable to everyone, even patients without access to cash. The clinics welcome payments of labor or handicrafts, which have included stunning rattan baskets dyed with charcoal and tree pigments, and rainbow floor mats woven from used plastic straws.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
South Africa Today – Environment
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