Charis Van Dusen and Professor Lynley Rowan, Health Sciences Department

As a group of ten Brigham Young University students and instructors, we came to teach the Dominican Republic’s national health facilitators a methodology of teaching accompanied with a manual devised by Laubach Literacy under the direction of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Each morning we would study international health issues and then go to train these promoters a means of teaching people how to approach their own problems.

I see in more vivid browns and grays how poverty is maybe equated with poor health conditions and poor sanitation. Even within the village of Buenos Aires where our group gave vaccinations for polio and measles there were significant contrasts. Closer to the torn-up, uneven streets people may have had a stair, a more separated single room, more concrete or an appliance or two. As we continued, one would catch out of the corner of an eye a narrow path between shacks, an alley that led to a whole other world of ‘homes’ on top of homes, children without parents, mothers without spouses, toddlers without clothes and so many without shoes or frankly a hope of ever knowing otherwise.

Streams of mud and old cooking and washing water lace the streets—if they can be called that— as naked babies covered in their own dirt sit in their wake. Mothers are busy, fathers are gone or sleeping or watching the TV they inevitably have.

Either hopelessness or not being able to envision anything better is a state I find many of these people in. As a result it is difficult to see if there is any push, any hunger, any empowerment to break these chains that keep them and their families in a cycle of poverty. Certainly, the onlooker is inclined to gratitude for parents, for a society that has given cause to dream, a cause for greater vision and enlightened ideals.

With so many facets lacking, with often minimal initiative from either the government or the people who are lacking, the cycle continues. If people are poor they will often have poor health, poor education access and as a result not be in school as necessary, not grow to strength possible, not gain the fundamental skills to get beyond their parents occupation and, in short, remain poor. The cycle continues. If people cannot be educated and understand the infrastructures of their world, they are not in a position to challenge those systems (i.e. caste, economical, political situations).

Infectious and noninfectious disease causing agents contribute to worldwide health problems. In low-income countries like the Dominican Republic, noninfectious agents like poor water and sanitary conditions, overcrowding, poor waste disposal, and especially lack of education help aggravate, proliferate viruses and bacteria. Yet, the improvement of one of these factors in stark reality does not equate with betterment of health opportunities. In the barrio of Buenos Aires a local clinic educator taught a group of community women in a teacher-learner guided style on prenatal care and birthing preparation. The excitement for change that permeated the group during and after suggested that education did indeed have great potential to raise the living standard of at least these women’s lives. Understanding prenatal nourishment and the importance of keeping birthing conditions sanitary seemed of value to their world.

Cultural tendencies and health incompatibilities were apparent. Instead of alcohol, oregano and chicken feathers were the substance of choice for healing a newborn’s placenta. Instruction on health issues appeared to be useful for some social change.

However, while leaving the neighborhood, we encountered a woman Yolanda, our native educator, knew and we stopped in her house. A diploma on the wall revealed that this new mother was in fact a graduate of statistics from the University of Santo Domingo. While her home was a little more like a home, with more than the single room divided by tin sheets, it was still a shack in the barrio of a poverty-stricken Buenos Aires. This educated woman maintained a lifestyle that was not entirely different than those who lived some fifty feet further in the valley of the slums. Yes, education can permit people to better their surroundings though not always providing a means of removal from the ‘barrios’ of their lives. It appears often education is not enough to create ground fertile for personal, even social change. Health, clean water, political stability and job opportunities can lead people to discover a better way, a something more.

In my own moments of personal synthesis, I want to believe change is possible and no one is completely trapped in his or her traditions or fates. Hope is the only thing man cannot live without, says doctor Socorro Gross, director of the Pan American Health Organization for the Caribbean. Then, people and nations alike can change, can improve their own circumstance— can hope for a better world.

I was permitted to see some of that light in a sea of darkness that day in the barrio. The light that was brightest belonged to a little family of similar circumstance but of much greater hope. In this densely populated barrio we came across a member family with a home of comparable structure but entirely different feeling. Every Dominican home has two things if it has anything at all: a radio and a TV. While every other home blared tropical dancing Merengue music, this special home rang with hymns—Praise to the Man—in Spanish. The walls had the Proclamation on the Family, a picture of the temple and one of their family—and it was clean. It was a temple, a house of order, a house of God.

It is the gospel that provides a greater vision, a greater hope for a better world—for something more. People need options. People need first opportunity, empowerment and finally a chance to choose. These have been my and the group’s greatest findings, obvious, certain and with unconcealed clarity. An embracement of the principles of the gospel is the developmental and spiritual answer to poverty—to all the concerns of this world, temporal or otherwise. I surmise it is only when people know who they are that they see such great value in their existence and then have a desire or empowerment to better their world.

The status of the research includes the current collaboration of the Pan American Health Organization and the Local and Area Authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This promising dialogue includes plans to call church members to team-teach health discussions using this methodology with a PAHO member in the local church buildings. Targeted audiences will be both LDS and non-LDS community women living in proximity to the buildings. My honors thesis project will include much of the follow-up of these developments.