My work in Renchinlhumbe

I was working with a physician, named Kherlen as mentioned before, and started administering surveys on several different areas to the local residents of Renchinlhumbe. We began in the countryside and had some great success in determining what was working. Next we had to make a transistion to the town. Luckily we had the assistance of a respected local ommunity leader and Bioregions reputation made working in different organizations easy. The school and the government were also focuses of our work, both for recruiting townsfolk as well as for getting more info. about the community.
This is the school, they teach every grade and have a total of 825 students. Throughout the winter they must also house 250 students whose parents have no accomodations in town. I was very dissapointed to find a lack of statistics everywhere I went so it was truly a wonderful day hen we discovered the governmental statistical officer in his office. He had a computer and generator hookup that also powered a printer. So we were finally able to make some real changes to our survey design and print out some revised pages and addendums.
Now that we were prepared and meeting people in the city we felt prepared to once again enter the countryside and discover more. First, we traveled to the first and second bags (sub-county units) to visit the doctors that work there. They are prepared no more than nurses and yet are completely responsible for maintaining wellness of areas sometimes approaching 250 square kilometers and with up to 1,250 people. An impossible job under the best of circumstances and in this remote area even more difficult. Only one of these doctors has a motrocycle the others must all travel by horse. We also completed some interviews there and were horrified when performing healh screening to find the blood pressures of some people. It was routine to discover BPs of >220/>110, the record being 285/142. Unbelievable!
We then traveled to another bag where they had stationed a ger hospital and were able to observe a training day. I was not surprised to see the turnout as 100% female. However, the staff do not get paid for this service and work very hard to carry it out effectively. They rely on the community for food, wood and transportation of their supplies. Anoter wonderful chance to get some surveys done.
I then returned to the town and started developing projects with local key informants as well as beginning to relate my results to the community. I was aksed to teach a course at the hospital and chose basics of program planning or the presentation. I was hoping this would help them in providing stronger proposals for health improvement in the future. The current proposals I would sometimes receive were all budget and no proposal. I was told my course went over beautifully.

So that brings me to the point of relaying some of my results from the work. This is a posting for another day. Sorry, we will get caught up soon. My work in UB (the capitol) is going well and Tugsu Amina and I are all well. Talk to you all soon,

Finally........An Update!

Alright, try not to hate me, it has been a month and a half. However, when I am done with my update I hope you can be understanding. First, we made it to Renchinlhumbe soum in northern Mongolia safe and sound. Here is a map of where we were in Northern Huvsgul. If you want more information on where this is in relations to other places in Mongolia search out lake Huvsgul on google.

When you see where it is located you will not be surprised to find that it was still snowing sporadically there after we arrived on May22nd. Wow, that lead to some miserable nights even if we were staying in a ger.

The valley though was beautiful, ringed as it is by tall mountains. I can see why BioRegions, the NGO from Montana State University I was working with, was so dedicated to preserving their natural beauty and resources.

The work began right away. There were interviews at the hospital, the government center, the school and the Mongolian local coordinater of BioRegions. Fortunately, I had attained permission to work from the Ministry of Health and was ably assisted from the state capitol of Murun by the state health director. Also, the physician I had brought along to assist with my surveys was very quickly able to build relationships with the local people. A few days after we arrived we drove about 4 hours out to visit a remote mobile ger hospital they have developed. We got to see the rural health in action as well as pilot our survey.

The work was turning out to be challenging, however, as technical support for the development of our work was unavailable. It took us two weeks to find a printer that would work, there is no electricity and an unreliable supply of petrol to operate the many personal generators that are around, only one central place to make phone calls, so of course no internet, and the nearest place we could go to to find these necessities was a twelve hour jeep ride away ($175 round trip). We had to improvise as best we could. A description of the work we carried out and our results will follow. Stay tuned...