Yesterday morning all 30 of us piled in to a bus to head out to our first day of screening in Puranchaur. I kept being worried that someone on our field staff would bail out, get a flat tire, have a sick buffalo, or need to attend a last-minute puja at an uncle’s house. But everyone made it on to the bus. And it took very little time before bus songs began, complete with Live Traditional Dance By Dental Technician.

Thank goodness I have 12 years of Race to the Rock under my belt. I knew to have a map of our planned camp flow, and I hoped that, as we’d been assured, the needed chairs and tables were already at the Health Post waiting for us. I’d printed out this high-tech map for everyone in their welcome packets, and I brought an extra copy of the map with me since I knew most people would leave their welcome packets at the hotel, and this series of actions allowed me to answer most questions in either language from any one of 30+ people with: “Ah. Have a look at the map! Oh that’s okay. I put a copy of the map over there. It will answer all your questions.” Tricky, right?

We are aiming to have 300 mother/child pairs for Madhurima to screen in the next three days. That is a lot of people to mobilize in a rural area where people are busy cutting firewood during this season, and especially when you consider Puranchaur already has weekly dental services available, plus we’ve done outreach in schools already. We’re hoping that will work to our advantage, and that the teachers assigned in each school to run the brushing programs will bring students and mothers. But it’s also exam time, so we knew things would be slow till mid-morning. Once everything was set up, there was that familiar lull…would anything happen?

…Anything?

Then suddenly we looked out and saw this line of primary school kids in their uniforms winding our way over the hills towards us. If this isn’t the cutest thing you’ve seen related to dental care outreach programs in mountainous regions, you have no heart.

I want to explain how we organized this project using a human-rights design, because it seems obvious, but actually, a lot of these details are rarely prioritized. What we care about with JOHC is the development of dignified, sustainable, high-quality health care for rural Nepali people. It was important to me to set up this collaboration in a way that promoted the development of local services, which meant not only studying interventions or issues in the abstract, or providing a transient benefit to participants in a study, but building the manifest capacity of local providers and institutions.

Fortunately, although JOHC is small it is mighty, because we have those providers and are already working with all the schools, the local government, and the local Health Post in Puranchaur. The involvement of our team leaders and clinic staff in this project was a great development opportunity for them – and therefore the communities they work in – and as long as consciously nurture it, that benefit occurs regardless of the outcome of the research.

We were also able to set up this collaboration as an opportunity to strengthen and test our community relationships. Our preparation involved a great deal of mobilization, largely done by our team leader in Puranchaur, who is himself a local resident. We’ll still be in Puranchaur when the week is over, so we’re accountable and vulnerable to the way in which the program impacts the community and its power structures. Which is as it should be. In short, the project is about Puranchaur and the other villages where our teams work, not about us, and that’s what I care about.

Of course, we still had our breaths held all morning. We had kids, but would we get mothers? But as the day went on, the pace picked up. Things got so packed in the clinic upstairs, where our technicians were providing their usual treatments plus the new fluoride and silver fluoride treatments, that by the second day, we needed to move to a large training hall. On the second day, as word got out, we got even more people – about 140. Bethy and Keri were able to provide intensive oversight to our technicians as they worked; our team leaders were collaborating with the UCal students to conduct surveys, help with dental exams, and provide the same oral health and brushing instruction they do already in their home villages. On the ride home that evening, our team leader Kasev, who had been conducting interviews with mothers, said that many participants referenced the school brushing programs when talking about their health practices.  It was as awesome a day as we’d have dared to hope for.

Tomorrow we are off to Hansapur, a non-working area where we had to apply our best strategies to get the word out.  It’s a great chance to get some anecdotal evaluation of differences between an area where we work, and one where we haven’t yet.  Let’s hope we get as good a response as we did today!

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