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Vajra Varahi Health Clinic
October Update - Dental and Medical Camp Lumbini 2009 available for Download
Vajra Varahi Healthcare needs volunteer practitioners NOW!
Vajra Varahi Healthcare is a small charitable health care organisation based in Chapagaon, a village just outside Kathmandu in Nepal. We have a clinic, situated next to Vajra Varahi Buddhist monastery, providing treatment from a range of alternative healthcare traditions. We would like to add more!
We have a Tibetan doctor, and an homoeopathic practitioner who visit once a week: both are locally employed Nepalis. We have also been providing very low cost community acupuncture treatments to a full appointment book of local people since November 2008, with each practitioner seeing about 20 patients a day for 6 days a week
Acupuncture is not common in Nepal and all our acupuncture and TCM practitioners are overseas volunteers. There is no local osteopath, chiropractor or massage therapist.
We would really like to keep the acupuncture going – and so would the villagers! We would like to add other treatments too. Are you a qualified acupuncturist, chiropractor, osteopath, or massage therapist who would like to volunteer to work with us?
We pay our Nepali interpreting and administrative staff, and along with running costs, that takes all our current income; sadly we can't afford to pay overseas staff. In fact, we ask you to contribute 500 nepali rupees per day towards food and interpretation (about $7) and contribute needles and herbs (if you use them). But we can provide a congenial and very pretty rural environment, a clean comfortable bedroom with a bed and a sink, decent plumbing, hot water, a healthy hot lunch every working day, a modern kitchen for your own cooking, dining room and a pleasant roof terrace. We have needles, some TCM herbs, clean modern practice rooms with chairs and a massage table, and the chance to practice in a way unlike the way we can in the West.
Here you are often the first and only practitioner from whom the patient has sought help. As a result they are frequently taking no other medication. We see problems unknown to us back home. Patients can afford to come for a full course of treatment, as frequently as required, and are willing to do so. There is massive scope for invaluable health education with patients who have little understanding about their condition, its treatment or prevention. You will work across language and culture with a professional interpreter, learning a host of new skills. Personal satisfaction for the practitioner and appreciation from patients are enormous.
To counter the pleasures, electricity is infrequent, internet access ditto, the phone only enables incoming international calls and dahl baht is our daily lunch. It takes an hour into Kathmandu by 2 microbuses – but they do stop just outside the clinic! And we are only a hour from the airport......
Most volunteers stay for 4-12 weeks, an ideal time for seeing new patients through to fruition.
If you are up for a challenge please get in touch!
We are happy to answer any questions at all you may have. We are on Skype and can talk also by phone as well as email. Write to me with your number!
Treat yourself and your practice to the trip of the decade!
Nicky Glegg, Director Vajra Varahi Healthcare
Email: vajravarahihealthcare@gmail.com
Skype ID : nickyglegg@hotmail.com
Dental and Medical Camp Lumbhini 2009
For two weeks four blue banners hung at the crossroads in the centre of Lumbhini, birthplace of the Buddha, in Southern Nepal close to the Indian border. Their hand-painted lettering read; ' Rangjung Yeshe Shenpen, Free Dental and Medical Camp, 21st - 24th September, at the Korean Temple, Lumbhini '.
Like all hosts we wondered at first if anyone would come to the event we had spent weeks planning and days setting up. We needn't have worried! As the gates opened on 21st September it became clear that the dental and medical services being offered were meeting a real need for people from villages all over the district.
Twelve dentists from Singapore and Malaysia and two from Nepal got down to business at 7.30 am on one side of the huge verandah, in front of rooms holding suitcases of supplies and trailing wires to their drills. The three medical doctors and one nurse on the team from Singapore and Malaysia set up consulting tables and a pharmacy under the eaves on the verandah opposite.
Thirty five volunteers from Kathmandu and Lumbhini held heads, hands and instruments, sterilised equipment, ferried patients back and forth, registered details, calmed nerves, and held back the crowds. Interpreters relayed information from local dialects into Nepali then into English and back, over and over again. That first day a comfortable 250 people arrived on foot for dental treatment and 350 to see the doctors.
Day two began with arrivals at six am. Men, women and children waited in the
hot humid compound among the puddles from the downpour of the day
before. Slowly the orderly lines were swelled with new arrivals hoping for a
place in the shade of the registration hut or a seat on a bench on the wide
verandahs, ever closer to the treatment areas. As more and more people arrived
so did the local police to help with the good natured but firm crowd control.
Monks dispensed water and biscuits tirelessly through out the day. I watched
one small boy, who had been waiting six hours to see a doctor for a foot wound, carefully pocket his biscuits (despite the longing look he gave as he put them away) to share with his younger brother waiting by the gate. We finished before sunset with everyone who had queued being seen in the end and all those who had been helping exhausted but exhilarated. By lunchtime on day four the dentists had seen nearly a thousand hundred people for fillings and extractions and handed out hundreds of toothbrushes with
advice on their use – and balloons! Many of our patients had not seen a dentist before - which may have accounted for the the need to constantly move on bystanders from the entertainment of watching an extraction.
The medical doctors saw an amazing two and a half thousand patients from babies of a month old to nonagenarians. There was a great deal of joint and back pain, digestive problems, skin complaints and infections. Four serious complaints were referred to the hospital in Bhaihawara. Although the heat was intense, good humour remained intact – the result we suspect of the excellent food prepared three times a day by our monk-cooks
and supplemented with ample and wonderful milk tea and biscuits!
Our very grateful thanks go all those people who made the camp a success,
every one of them a vital part of the team. All our medicines were donated by the
Nepali Society (NRN Singapore). The Lumbhini Development Trust and the local Lumbhini District police found us places to live and work. The Korean Temple hosted us with patience, allowing us to colonise vast areas for the event.
Doctors, dentists and nurses took a week from their practices or gave up precious annual leave to join the camp. Overseas volunteers paid for their airfares and accommodation, as well as raising contributions from generous donors in Singapore and Malaysia to support their work here. Monks, nuns and lay volunteers gave their time and effort with generosity.
All in all everyone worked harmoniously together to make a reality of our motto
'compassion into action'.
VAJRA VARAHI HEALTHCARE
On 11 th November 2008 Vajra Varahi Healthcare opened it's headquarters and clinic in Chapagaon in the Kathmandu Valley. Built with the support of students it is staffed by paid Nepali staff and overseas volunteers.
Our mission is
“ Making accessible and effective healthcare, a reality for everyone”
through
- providing access to a range of low cost healthcare – Tibetan, Ayurvedic, homoeopathic and Traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture as well as allopathic medicine – to people in Nepal who have little or no access to health services
- conducting research on the effectiveness of different healthcare traditions and sharing the results worldwide.
We have been open for 150 days providing acupuncture and homoeopathy, and we have we have seen nearly 2000 different patients in 4000 separate appointments. All appointments have been fully booked since we opened and currently the wait for an appointment is 10 days.
We have had major success with stroke or fever induced paralysis, gastric pain and inflammation, burning urination, joint and back pain, asthma and respiratory tract infections, headaches, high blood pressure, gastric problems and lower abdominal pain, and scar pain following operations.
- Unit costs per treatment in our first five months were Nrs 37 – that's USD 0.46
What else have we done since we opened?
- Trained 6 Nepali / English interpreters
- Begun acupuncture training for 2 Nepali staff
- Installed a rainwater harvesting system and solar hot water for the clinic and will soon purchase a solar powered electricity backup system for using during power cuts.
- Stocked a core homoeopathic and Tibetan pharmacy.
- Recycled all our plastic medicine bottles, exchanging them for potatoes!
- Worked one session a week with partners 'Saathi Samuha', an NGO, treating 10 people / session who are HIV+.
What next?
- In September 2009 we will be hosting another of the previously very successful dental / medical / optical camps alongside a group of practitioners from Singapore in the distant countryside location of Sahbruk Yeshe
- By the end of the year we will be staffing a new health post in the Shivapuri National Park serving 3 villages who have no healthcare at present. We will be there once a week.
- In October we will start regular optician sessions at both Vajra Varahi and the village health-post
- Cases of cataracts we detect will be shared with Kathmandu Lions Association who will sponsor treatments.
How can I help?
- From April to October it will cost $40 (£25) a day to run the clinic– a unit cost of $2 (£1.25) per treatment.
- In addition, medicines will cost an average of $2 (£1.25) per treatment.
Currently we continue to rely on charitable donations from individuals and grants from charitable organisations, with a small income from people paying to stay at the clinic.
Your donation however small is very welcome – whether it be in cash or in kind.
What Your Donation Could Buy –
US $3, €3 or £2 will …
- Pay for a dental treatment for two people.
- Buy Ayurvedic or Tibetan medicine for one person for one month.
- Treat 10 cases of scabies, ringworm or diarrhoea with homoeopathy
- Pay for a days interpreting, enabling an acupuncturist to treat 20 people
US $40, €35 or £25 will …
- pay the running costs of the clinic for a day
- Buy a stethoscope.
- Buy training materials for 6 new practitioners.
.
US $140, €130 or £100 will …
- Pay a doctor for a month.
- Buy shelving for the pharmacy
If you would like to sponsor anything from a single patient treatment, some medicines, or a months running of the clinic to a medical camp we would be very happy to receive your contribution.
- to donate money online to the Vajra Varahi Clinic, please use the following button:
Or click here.
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