by Laura
This weekend I am back in Kaskikot, so I’ve been able to catch up again with the Kaskikot Team – Chitra (our head trainee), Durga (student who volunteered to do patient intakes, and turned in to a trainee), and Prem Sir (a teacher who volunteered with us) and Govinda (our local coordinator). We all met at Prem’s house early in the morning on friday to decide what to do next. Should they try to start volunteering at the family planning clinic, or maybe team up with Eva Nepal’s oral health care clinic that runs on sundays? What about practicing on each other, or at home? We tossed around different ideas for where to go from here.
One of my ideas is that, instead of trying to box themselves in to a traditional clinical setting, Kaskikot’s IMT team make use of Nepal’s ready-made culture of natural healing and sitting around on porches gabbing. Combine these two activities and you more or less have the basic-level IMT protocols we were teaching for heavy-hitting indications like, say, pregnancy. Or post-surgery, chronic gastrointestinal problems, food poisoning. I especially encouraged the group to get together once a week and practice on each other, and not to limit their idea of a “clinic” to something in a white building.
We also went page by page through the training manual, something we didn’t have time to do when everyone was here together.
I also spent the weekend doing evaluations, starting with the trainees. They suggested that next time, a larger group of trainees first work together for a few intensive days before patients get inovolved. Then we all tromped around following up with most of the patients that we treated to see how they were doing. The vast majority reported clear improvements in whatever they’d been treated for; Mitu-didi said her pain was gone altogether, which I find hard to believe, so maybe she just wanted to fluff my feathers. Min-dai said he didn’t feel any different, and a handful of people said they’d felt better right after treatment, but then their symptoms returned. Moti-lal dai, the one with the fashionable stockings, said the leg that Will had treated had improved significantly.
Overall, it was a really positive and encouraging response!
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