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Unfortunately, the language requirement was dropped and the education
requirement kept. This meant that almost all the health technicians trained were of
Spanish (Ladino) origin. They neither spoke the local languages nor represented
the people where they were to work. As a result, the program has had many
difficulties.
As we have already mentioned, persons who have completed secondary school
often do not make as good health workers as those with less schooling. Their
education seems to separate them from the majority of their people. Many are
more interested in getting ‘higher education’ or ‘better jobs’ in the city. They are
more likely to abandon their people.
Also, as we discussed in Chapter 1, persons with much formal education may
have an extra burden of unhealthy values. They need to unlearn and relearn a great
deal in order to become effective community health workers.
By contrast, persons with less formal education tend to feel themselves more in
harmony with, and equal to, the poor majority. They may be more ready to commit
themselves to community health work.
Persons with only a few years of schooling often make
more reliable, more community-strengthening health
workers than those who have had more formal education.
Once again, of course, there are exceptions.
TRADITIONAL HEALERS AND
MIDWIVES AS HEALTH WORKERS
Many programs have trained traditional healers,
herbalists, bone setters, and traditional midwives as
village health workers—often with good results.
Advantages to training traditional healers as health
workers:
• They already have the confidence of the people
in their own special area of health care.
• They have a strong grounding in traditional and spiritual forms of care and
healing. To these they can add concepts of modern health care and medicine.
Often the combination of the old and the new, unique to the area, is better than
either way by itself.
• They are usually persons with great experience and strong beliefs. So they may be
more able to defend their people’s culture and resist the use of foreign ideas and
technologies not suited to local needs.
• They are often persons firmly rooted in their communities and deeply committed
to serving people in need. (But be careful. Some traditional healers use their
special knowledge to exploit or gain power over others.)