Community

Real life sprawls across categories. Tackling diarrheal diseases, for example, takes medicine, hygiene training, and toilets. A single project in isolation, even if it’s a good one, can’t by itself move a whole community forward. That’s why we work with our local partners to integrate health, education and community development.

In a Karen village of chickens and woven-thatch homes is “Aunty,” a traditional woman with her hair in a bun. She teaches about hand washing, latrines and nutrition, and tests for and treats malaria. Aunty is chosen by the community, and she’s there to help 24/7.

In Burma, one in seven children die before they reach the age of five, and many of these deaths — due to diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria — are easily preventable. The challenge is to provide essential basic services to tens of thousands of villagers who have become nearly inaccessible due to civic conflict, displacement, and isolated and rugged jungle terrain.

In the mountainous jungle of eastern Burma, a petite 24-year-old Karen woman peels back layers of white plastic and cloth wrapped around a stalk of sugar cane — a prop simulating bone, muscle and skin — before cutting it with a cable saw to practice amputation.

There are no doctors or hospitals for eastern Burma’s half million displaced civilians, many of them living in active conflict zones, in a region with one of the highest rates of landmine injuries in the world. Rapid access to trauma care is critical for landmine victims because of blood loss and severity of injury: approximately one in three survivors require amputation.

It was a routine, sweltering mid-April day in a village for internally displaced people living just one kilometer from the Thai border. Then a medic counted up five kids she had seen with coughs, pink eye and a red rash all over the body.

Were there more children with these symptoms in their village? Many, the medic was told, and she immediately suspected measles, a vaccine-preventable virus that is highly contagious and can spread quickly, especially where malnutrition is rife and healthcare systems almost non-existent.

A capsule of Vitamin A reduces blindness and a child’s chance of death by one-third. Deworming medication just twice a year combats malnutrition and improves a child’s cognitive capacities. Like immunizations, these are simple, effective and low cost interventions that greatly improve family and community health.

At midnight in the rugged jungle of eastern Burma, a village headman’s young daughter was in labor, lying on a mat in the small hut she shared with her husband. She was petite and anemic from malnutrition and a history of malaria. A traditional birth attendant, an older woman relying on experience and local remedies, was by her side. The baby finally emerged, a healthy squalling boy. But the placenta did not come out, and the situation quickly turned dire as the new mother began to bleed heavily.

Burmese women along the Thai-Burma border face enormous risks in having children: the vast majority are anemic and deliver their babies without trained assistance or access to emergency obstetric services. Nearly 1% of pregnancies result in maternal death, mostly from bleeding after delivery or infection — one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world.

The Thai-Burma border is often described as an "epicenter" of drug-resistant malaria. Malaria prevalence (the proportion of the population with the disease at any time) among internally displaced people in eastern Burma is up to twenty times higher than across the border in Thailand.