If you’re alive and have access to the internet (which I think we can safely assume since you are reading these words), then you have no doubt been exposed to some terrible medical messaging over the past year and a half. This is tragic during a global health crisis, as lives often depend on the careful, concise delivery of accurate medical information…
Read MoreFor as long as people have had the power of language, they’ve used that power to disagree about ideas. The information age has accelerated these disagreements into a frenetic, full-scale war. Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than with the question of immunisations…
Read MoreDo you hate going to the doctor?
Imagine you went to the doctor’s office and she held up a strange-looking medical instrument and said, “Hello friends. I want to give this opportunity now. It can die like a mosquito, but it can also save your life.”* You would probably be more than just confused—you’d be scared. And the next time you felt sick, you might avoid the doctor altogether (and tell others in your community to do the same).
This is a problem that millions of people all over the world experience every time they go to the doctor, or some well-meaning healthcare provider attempts to give them vital, life-giving information…
Read MoreDuring the past few weeks, there have been times when it has felt like we’ve all decided to just take a vacation from talking and worrying about Covid-19 as we’ve focused, instead, on the #BlackLivesMatter protests and the history of systemic racism in America.
But as necessary and important as all this soul-searching and activism are, the fact of Covid-19 remains. By the end of May, the virus had been the world’s leading cause of death for almost exactly one month—having caused around a hundred thousand more deaths in 2020 than its closest lethal competitor, malaria…
Read MoreYou’ve probably seen this picture before, but did you know that the woman in the photograph is named Florence Owens Thompson? She was thirty-two at the time Dorthea Lange took her picture, and a widowed mother of seven children. Thompson told Lange that she had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, as well as birds that her children had killed. Dorthea Lange’s portrait of the “Migrant Mother” has come to be one of the most iconic images in American history. It helped galvanize the American public during the Great Depression. It drew people together, and is part of the reason why Americans came to remember that era as a time when the community gathered to help those in need…
Read More"You have to use the media, the methods, that fit your audience."
The difficulty of providing clear, accessible information about communicable diseases might seem like a problem for white-hatted development workers in foreign countries. But even though it’s primarily an issue for minority language groups, it’s important to remember that medical messaging is a problem that can affect anyone, anywhere…
Read MoreMalnutrition affects over twenty percent of children in the world today. That’s roughly the equivalent of the entire population of the United States—a huge problem.
One of the barriers to addressing this problem is language, as a high percentage of the children affected by malnutrition live in indigenous communities where the primary language is different than the that of the culture at large. How do you educate parents about the vital importance of early nutrition in their children’s development if they’re not proficient in the language in which that sort of information is available?
Problems this big can seem insurmountable. But there is hope...
Read More
CCIH Annual Conference, 2015: Yoram Siame, MPH, MSc, Advocacy and Public Relations Manager, Churches Health Association of Zambia
Development programs in education and health are often quite separate from one another. So it was refreshing to attend this year’s annual conference of Christian Connections for International Health with its theme of “Ending Extreme Poverty”. As part of that broader theme, I was invited to co-lead a session on “Lifting People out of Poverty with Innovative Educational and Economic Development Programs” in which several of us shared about the connections between education, health, and economic empowerment.
The positive responses to my presentation on “Reading in the Mother Tongue” told me that health specialists are no strangers to the challenges of local languages in health programs. One fascinating example of the intersection of health and education was a presentation on training illiterate women to serve as community health workers. The agency involved used very creative means to equip these women to interview mothers and identify any health issues warranting a referral to a clinic. It struck me that some of the reading and writing readiness activities we use in the education sector could be helpful for enabling such women, who do not know how to write, to be able to use a pen or pencil effectively in marking interview sheets with illustrations of various health concerns.
Author and SIL LEAD Executive Director, Paul Frank, giving the opening plenary presentation at this year's CCIH conference.
Given my normal focus on language and formal education I don’t often think about other sectors of development, but the common thread of empowering people to take charge of their own development and the common goal of ending extreme poverty helped me take a step back from my default viewpoint. During the conference, I was challenged to look at things from a more holistic perspective again. It was humbling to hear about some of the difficulties people in the health sector face as they work to bring adequate medical care to the most rural and unreached areas. I am encouraged by the possibilities for collaboration and contributing our experience within SIL LEAD and our partners into projects that address the pressing health needs that many minority language communities face.
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