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1. Changed individual lives, physically and morally.
2. Those individual lives will change other peoples' lives; thereby, multiplying the results throughout a community in order for the community to be changed from the inside out.
3. We want the program to continue after outside assistance has left the individual village - sustainability.
4. We want to see an entire country changed physically and morally - saturation.
Presented here are illustrative examples from countries where these goals have been accomplished. We realize that some of the activities are not applicable to all countries, but in spite of this, we believe the concepts represented by these illustrations are universally true.
In one project during a home-visit, we met an elderly man named Samwell. How to clean your heart was shared with Samwell using a picture booklet. By the end of the conversation, he had tears running down his cheeks.
When asked if he would like to truly change his life by cleansing his heart, he did so with excitement. After talking with the CDE for a length of time, he held up the booklet, turned to us and said in English, “My passport to a new life . . . my visa to a new life.”
More than a year later Samwell remains strong in his moral character. He has other people read to him daily from the Holy Books and even has many passages memorized. Because of the tremendous changes that have taken place in Samwell’s life, he has been a strong witness to others in the community. Samwell exemplifies the reason moral values must be integrated with any village health program. The need for transformed lives is just as necessary as the need for improved health care.
Changed Individual Lives Multiplied throughout the Community: Our project in the Congo done in conjunction with a local organization has grown rapidly throughout the community. After four years the project saw the number communities change physically and morally.
Physically, over 20,000 women and children were seen at antenatal and well-baby clinics with almost 6,500 children being vaccinated.
CDEs made almost 10,000 home-visits to their neighbors. There were over 1,700 new pit latrines, 1,200 rubbish pits built, and over 1,400 families received a “Healthy Home Award” for having completed five major health interventions with their family in that year.
In another project the leader of a local organization caught the vision of CDE. Initially, an outside training team spent 16 months with him establishing one CDE project in his village. Since the team left, he mobilized the people in 40 surrounding villages to become involved in CDE and trained over 150 CDEs. He also mobilized the people to build, equip, and staff their own clinic, and then build a 20-bed ward. Both these projects were self-funded. In addition, they protected over 100 water sources and had five wells drilled by the government.
At the beginning of the project, 70 percent of the people had a problem with alcohol because they made their living brewing alcohol. After five years with the CDEs doing active education, mentoring, and teaching people how to earn a living by vegetable gardening, growing tree seedlings, fruit trees, coffee, wheat, sunflowers, bee-keeping, and fish farming, less than 30 percent still had a problem with alcohol.
In Papua New Guinea the Department of Health and Church Health Services adopted the CDE strategy as their wholistic health program. The Government Health Workers are trained as CDEs and are beginning to work in their villages. As the government is continuing to train more individuals, the CDE strategy, including the physical and the moral value elements, is beginning to reach more villages … more provinces … and eventually, the entire country. © CDC2005 |
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a CDE program we are interested in results at four levels:
