|
When she wasn’t working
barefoot in the wheat fields, she was seeing patients, free of charge: Soothing fevers. Stopping stomach aches. Opening chakras.
And hoping for the best.
When the best actually happened — when someone, or someone’s pig, got well — she was elated. To this day, she says, she has known no other satisfaction quite like it.
“Yes,” she says, “I miss it, yes. You can really help people. The joy of seeing a patient cured. … It is hard not to be happy.”
That is why Enlin, now 50, supervises the Amity Foundation’s healthcare program, which trains doctors for service in rural western China — where they do what Enlin did in Anhui Province: Provide medical care to folks who cannot pay.
Chinese Christians created Amity in 1985 to promote rural development, education and social services. It a partner of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
The program turns out “barefoot doctors” — a reference to Mao’s rural “doctors” that also serves as a nickname. Since 1989, Amity has trained more than 20,000 gynecologists, obstetricians and surgeons to serve in rural villages, each with 18 months of training. When the Chinese government began requiring medical practitioners to have three-year degrees, Amity had to decide whether to extend its training or try to negotiate an exception.
Officials feared that “barefoot doctors” with three-year degree might walk away from rural healthcare for more lucrative jobs in China’s cities — defeating the program’s purpose. So its trainees stay rooted in the villages, getting the extra training through correspondence courses.
Enlin said a government official was sold on the concept after touring a clinic one of Amity’s former students was operating in his thatched-hut-home. A sign at the door read: “For those who are poor, there is free care. For the handicapped, there is free care. For the aged, there is free care. For the widow, there is free care.”
“Basically,” she says with a wry smile, “everybody enjoys free care.”
The house was shabby. The kids were barefoot. The living room doubled as the examining room. The rural doc was embarrassed; because the wheat crop had been ruined by a drought, so he was unable to repay a $120 loan he’d obtained from Amity to stock up on basic medicines. Like most other “barefoot doctors,” he farms for a living.
But he was at home, practicing medicine. He told Enlin, “I never dreamed I’d be a village doctor.”
All the official said was: “We need this kind of village doctor.”
Enlin is talking quietly during a break between meetings at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville. She is no chatter-box. She speaks deliberately, laughs easily. In excellent English, she reminisces about her past and brainstorms for ways to better equip future novice doctors.
Although she learned acupuncture from her father, a pastor who needed a second profession after the Cultural Revolution, she didn’t expect to be a doctor either. But when she left Anhui Province, she wanted to practice medicine.
It was a blow when her father insisted that she attend Nanjing Seminary after it re-opened in 1981. She obeyed, but hankered for the hands-on patient care she had found so rewarding.
In 1987 she began directing Amity’s training program for village doctors. This, she says, is “God’s call for me.” She also is a pastor now, and Amity’s associate general secretary for project management. Her professional loves are now in balance, not in tension.
In more ways that one, she’s a long way from Anhui Province.
She doesn’t miss the long nights in her hut, where she cowered alone and afraid of the dark, singing Psalm 23 to calm herself as the wind howled around her. Or salted pickles, a dietary staple of the very poor. Or the lump in her throat when she wasn’t sure what to do for a patient.
She says her heart stuck in her throat once when the local Communist Party chief pounded on her door at midnight, asking her to come treat his mother-in-law. The asthmatic woman was so ill that the family had moved her body from the bed to the floor — a rural ritual for people expected to die. Enlin knew that the acupuncture points to restore her breath were in the throat, the back — and the heart, the one involving the most risk.
“So I tried,” she says, recalling how her hand trembled as she inserted the needles. “It was very dangerous. And, she came to life after 20 minutes. She survived four more years.”
Things didn’t always go so smoothly.
She pinned her first patient to the table with a needle, provoking a screaming fit. That patient, however, forgot about the stomach ache that had brought him to her door. And in an unexpectedly trusting gesture, he brought in his pig for treatment the next day.
Enlin often was paid in food — a few eggs or a mess of vegetables. “I got to be famous,” Enlin says. “It was cost-effective. I wasn’t charging anything.”
The current batch of student doctors are back in their home villages now for summer break. Their assignment is to study recurring diseases there and to figure out the cause. If people regularly have diarrhea, why? How is the water supply? Is the water filtered? Is there a well? Standing water? Should a pipe be sunk to channel water from a stream to the town?
“What’s common about disease isn’t all chemistry,” Enlin says. “There are very practical things.” She says she wants Amity’s doctors to think like public health workers — to look for ways to prevent disease.
She hopes pastoral-care course work will become routine for Amity doctors, so they can treat depression and other emotional disorders. “Now, there is nowhere to go” for such treatment, she says.
In medicine and ministry alike, she says, healing is the goal.
“I don’t there’s any difference now between the two fields,” she says. “It is serving in two different ways. My experience of social work helps preaching.” She says it also works the other way around.
Congregations aren’t meant to stay home reading the Bible and listening to finely honed sermons, she says. She’s sure about that.
“The idea is to do something,” she says, “to share the love.” |
