Project Manager: Shem Women's Group
Health issue is not taught in most of the universities and colleges in Qinghai Province, China, except in the Medical Colleges. As a result, university students and college students have very limited knowledge about health issues and hardly aware health issues
Laurence from Australia funded this project
What? Shem women’s group invited Doctor Sonamtso from Number Two Hospital to have a short time health training especially women health issues.
Who? Shem members, the students who got help from Mother’s Wish Foundation, some young women from Shokay , the Shambala Connection, and other women from variety working fields like Qinghai TV station and Qinghai Tibetan Medical Research Center, some business women as well as some students who are interested to participate this training.
Photos of during the training
All The participants are listening the training.
The doctor, Sonamtso is explaining some serious sexual diseases by using some photos from the book.
Some participants are looking at some photos of serious diseases which usually happen with reproductive organs during the break time.
All the participants are writing what they have learned from the training, as well as suggestions and comments for the whole training.
On the final training day, the organizer, Shem is offering white silk(Khata)to the woman who have been very supportive to Shem’s work.
All the participants who have participated in the health training.
Project summary
Project title: Health Training for young women
Location of project: Xining City, Qinghai Province.
Implementation organization/individual: Shem Women’s Group
Contact Group: Shem Women’s Group
Telephone: 0971–6302115
Email: info@shemgroup.org
Web site: www.shemgroup.org
Post: mailing labels
Lamaocuo
Qinghai, Xining
Xining Shi You Zheng Ju
Xin Ning Lu You Ju
20-5 Xin Xiang
China,
810008
Detail of project activities
| 08/11/08 | Shem as an organizer gave a very brief talk about the training and the propose of holding this training. Then Mr. Duo (he is from Qinghai Minority Charitable Fund and Shem has registers as small group under this Fund) gave a short speech about Shem as well as the training. Finally the doctor, Sonamtso started the training by talking about the women’s physical structures as well as the reproductive structure. Before finishing the first day’s training, Shem staff gave homework to all the participants to write the questions and comments they have for the first training. |
| 15/11/08 | All the participants asked different questions of heath problems that they have or their relatives have and the doctor explained all the questions and problems one by one very clearly in detailed way. After that the trainer continued the training by explaining the women’ menstruation, basically about when menstruation starts and what kinds of problem will be and how could you prevent all the problems. |
| 22/11/08 | Again before starting the training, the participants asked questions and began the training of some common sickness in our daily life, and especially the sickness that women have; the phenomenon of the sickness and ways of preventing the sickness. Additionally, the doctor taught some sample ways that we are neglecting in our daily life but important to our health. The doctor uses her own life story to teach us the importance of health in order to make it more realistic. |
| 29/11/08 | On the final day of the training, the doctor mainly gave training on sexual disease. Give examples of the disease with the pictures. All the participants gave lesson learnt, suggestions, and comments for the training. Shem offered appreciation to the doctor, Sonamtso and some other people. |
Project Finance
| Item | Price per item in rmb |
Number of items |
Total cost in rmb |
| Donation |
|
|
4,838 |
| Training Fee |
-250 |
4 |
-1,000 |
| Meeting Hall |
-300 |
4 |
-1,200 |
| Transportation |
-36.5 |
4 |
-146 |
| Materials |
|
|
-27 |
| Meals |
|
|
-303 |
| Deserts |
-132.4 |
4 |
-529.3 |
| Photos | -2.5 |
55 |
-137.5 |
| Appreciation |
|
-304 |
|
| Leftover |
1,191 |
Lessons learned and suggestions
A) From the participants
On the final day of training, we let all the particiapants write down what they have learnt from attending the health training and the comments they have. Here we have summarized some key points from their writing.
1. Has a better understanding about our body as a woman
The majority of participants have never been to medical school and in their schools there are not health related course or class, and the participants do not have idea about their body. Therefore the doctor explained in a very detail way of female body structure and especially the reproductive structure which can be easily affected by different disease. And the doctor supervised and urged all the females to clean their bodies and taught us some very practical and effective approaches to take care our own bodies from being affected by variety diseases and sicknesses.
2. Learnt some common healthy knowledge and appropriate habits in our daily life
Because of the very limited medical knowledge, most people in local areas are used to eat one kind of common medicine for every sickness no matter you get stomachache, cold or food poison. Also people usually eat food or drink water which is from overnight but actually it is not healthy. Get idea of what kind of food will be healthy to eat and what kinds of food one should not eat during the sick time and so on. All those small habits and behaviors are not difficult to practice; the only problem is people do not know these things. In addition, we learnt some very easy ways to prevent the sickness in our daily life like eating garlic before getting cold.
3.Cause and prevention of the women’s health problems
Getting a general idea what kind of diseases women can easily get, and the prevention of the disease and causes. Different aged women have different sicknesses and married women and unmarried women have different sicknesses. People should go to standard hospitals to check the health every year once at least, especially married women because those women can get more complex sickness as well as that woman are the future mothers they can not transfer the disease to their babies. As the doctor said improve the mothers’ senses of checking their health means to improve the whole nationality. People should get treatment before the sicknesses become worse and incurable disease, so all the people should have the common senses of seeing the doctor if you get sick.
4.the importance of the sanitation during menstrual period
All the participants in this training are young women and all of them really concern a series of issues and problems during their menstrual period. During the training, lots of young women asked questions to the doctor which happened to themselves or their female friends and relatives because of the menstruation. For instance, during menstrual period, women should not do any intensive actions, drink cold things, and wear very tight clothes and so on. Even those easy things people still do not know, because people do not have any hygiene education in the school.
5.Common sexual diseases
By listening the doctor’s teaching, the participants get to know the different kinds of sexual disease more or less and also the prevention of the sexual
diseases and how to identify the disease.
6.It is better to organize this kind of training at large scale
Since there are no hygiene classes in schools even in colleges in Qinghai Province, the participants hope this kind of health trainings can be held more often and more people can have access to attend the training.
7.It is better to hold health training at the village level
The villagers are very different from educated people, they do not have health sense at all, and there is high chance that the villagers get sick very easily, so it is important and necessary to have health training for village people.
8.It is better to have visual aids like projector
The projector can help the participants to understand better and easy for the doctor to explain abstract sickness. Therefore the projector can provide some photos and so on.
9. It is better to use simple words during training
As mentioned above, the participants do not have the knowledge of health scope, so it is very difficult to understand if the doctor uses the professional words, terms, and jargons in health field.
B) From Shem Women’s Group
The followings are some lesson learnt from by organizing this health training:
1. Communicating with the instructor (doctor)
Before the training, we should communicate with doctor about using simple words togive training on health, in this case the participants can easily understand the content of the training fully.
2.Be flexible according to the change of the situation
There were a large number of people attending this health training, and it is much more than we have plant, so the room is not enough to fit all these people in and it seemed much crowed. In this case as the organizer we should change another big meeting hall if the financial condition is sufficient.
3. Communication with the participant
We held all the health trainings during the Saturdays of November, and every week before the training, we communicate with the donor her convenient time for having the training, but not really asked the participant whether it is convenient for them. So one time, lots of Shem members couldn’t attend the training because of the time and we are very sorry about not communicating with them before.
Original Proposal
For Tibetan Female College Students
Facilitator: Doctor Sonamtso
Organizer: Shem Women’s Group
Brief Introduction For Doctor Sonamtso
Sonamtso is a Tibetan woman and she is forty-two. Sonamtso graduated from Qinghai Tibetan Medical College in 1989 and her major is in clinical. She is currently working in Qinghai University Affiliated Hospital Tumor Gynecology Department as an Assistant director doctor.
Brief Introduction for Organizer
Shem is a women’s group dedicated to empowering Tibetan women and their communities through grassroots development. We focus on increasing the well-being of people in impoverished communities by providing access to basic needs such as water, fuel, electricity, health care, and basic education. We fulfill our mission by training educated Tibetan women to design, implement, and manage sustainable grassroots development projects that will successfully alleviate the problems that their communities face. SWG has so far successfully completed 29 small-scale humanitarian projects in named provinces.
At the village level, while our projects fulfill basic survival needs for village women and their families, our project managers-educated Tibetan women-present villagers with strong female role models. The work of these young women raises villager’s confidence in women’s abilities and encourages villagers to value women’s education.
At the university level, we offer discussion groups and workshops designed to empower educated Tibetan women, and we provide women with the resources and training they need to put their ideas into action.
Shem means charity and compassion in Tibetan. Charity and compassion are fundamental to helping others, and are the guiding principles behind our work. The women of Shem hope to serve as inspirational examples for our families, peers, and generations of Tibetan women to come.
Shem began in October of 2003 as an after hours course in gender studies taught by Michelle Kleisath, an English teacher and gender studies specialist. In September of 2004, at the request of the gender class participants, Ms. Kleisath started teaching an additional course in small-scale development to interested women. This class began in hopes of encouraging female students to design and implement their own small-scale development projects. Such a class was unprecedented in Qinghai province.
During the course of the semester, the students learned how to identify the problems of their communities, design sustainable projects that would successfully alleviate these problems, write professional proposals to outside funding sources, and manage the execution of their projects.
By December of 2004, several project proposals were successfully completed and sent to donors for consideration. Once funded, these projects brought potable water to the villages, improved schools, brought solar electricity into the homes of nomadic communities, improved village infrastructure in the form of a bridge, and supported micro-financing in the form of a yak loan.
In an effort to create a sustainable support system for Tibetan women active in grassroots development, Shem was formed in March of 2005.
Since Shem’s inception, its’ members have raised nearly $149,228 in international funding and successfully implemented 32 small-scale development projects. These projects were funded by private donors and international funding organizations, including: The British Embassy, the Canada Fund, The German Embassy, The Netherlands Embassy, and the Shambala Connection.
contact information
Contact Group: Shem Women’s Group
Email: info@shemgroup.org
Phone: 86-971-630-2115
Mailing address:
Qinghai, Xining
Xining shi you zheng ju,
xin ning lu you ju
20-5xin xiang,
810008
China.
Website: http://www.shemgroup.org/
Why we need this training
Generally speaking, Health issue is not taught in most of the universities and colleges in Qinghai Province, China, except in the Medical Colleges. As a result, university students and college students have very limited knowledge about health issues and hardly aware health issues.
Even this is twenty first century and this is a sensitive area to talk about health problem related to sex or reproduction. Thus most of Tibetan women and girls are shy to talk about those health issues openly even if they know they have some health problems.
Also the women do not have a space for discussing health issues openly and share their problems among women themselves. Also people hardly encourage the educated women to pass their knowledge to one another.
Moreover, there are very few Tibetan books, magazines and newspapers talk about health problems, especially women’s health problems. So the students are lack of information of health problems.
In addition, the women almost never go to the hospital to check for Gynecological diseases unless they are very sick, so once they are very sick and go to the hospital then it is already becomes serious.
Due to above problems, the village women’s knowledge about health and health condition is worse than University students or educated Women. Because firstly, they are busy with their heavy work and no time to discuss health problems and gain knowledge about health issues. Secondly most of them never attend school and they themselves have to learn from other people. Thirdly, they are very lacking of health information, especially related to reproductive health issues because most of educated women are shy to talk those issues openly even if they learnt and hardly people encourage them to share what they learnt about health issues.
Solution
We will provide a space for women from different Colleges and Universities to discuss health issues and share each other’s knowledge about health openly. We will also invite Doctor Sonamtso to give training on health issue for those gathered women and teach importance of caring health problems. In addition, we will give assignment for each participant to pass what they have learned from Doctor Sonamtso or from other participants to five other village women. If any of them did not finish this assignment, there will be cash punishment (Each student needs to pay 10rmb for not telling the other village women about health issues that they have learnt and for five village total needs to pay 50 rmb as a punishment. So this mount of money will use to buy some medicines for the village women)
Beneficiaries
Around 50 College/University female students will directly benefit from the Health Training and around 250 village women will benefit through the 50 participants.
Brief concept of training
•1. Basic Knowledge about women’s health issue
•2. The importance of caring women’s health problems.
•3. The methods of preventing Gynecological disease.
Schedule
This project will be held for 3 hours each Saturday of September.
September 6th 2008, introduction and talk about why this training is needed and the importance of this training, start giving trainings about basic knowledge about women’s health issue.
September 13th 2008, continue giving the training on women’s health issue.
September 20th 2008, give training for methods of preventing Gynecological disease.
September 27th 2008, continue training on the methods for 2 hours, and then give assignment and closing the training.
Detailed Budget
| Item | Price per item in RMB |
Number of items |
Total cost in RMB |
| Training Fee | 200 | 4 | 800 |
| Classroom | 350 | 4 | 1400 |
| Transportation | 250 | 4 | 10,00 |
| Materials | 700 | ||
| Meals | 500 | ||
| Deserts | 200 | 4 | 800 |
| Photos | 10 | 52 | 520 |
| Appreciation | 100 | ||
| Total | 4820 |
Donation requested from the donor in Chinese Yuan: 4820rmb