The University of the Nations in Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i was founded in 1978 to train students from all the world to go every nation by serving every sphere of society with the love of God, and providing practical aid to help a hurting world. Continue reading “Youth With A Mission Day proclamation in Hawaii”
Primary health care: making Alma-Ata a reality
The principles agreed at Alma-Ata 30 years ago apply just as much now as they did then. “Health for all” by the year 2000 was not achieved, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015 will not be met in most low-income countries without substantial acceleration of primary health care.
Continue reading “Primary health care: making Alma-Ata a reality”
Primary Health Care at 30
In September 1978, the International Conference on Primary Health Care was held in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, then part of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR). Led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the conference produced the Alma-Ata Declaration, which underlined the need for governments to protect the health of all citizens and emphasized that health for all is both a socioeconomic (or development issue), and also a human right. The conference also highlighted the inequalities between developed and developing countries, and between the elite and ordinary people within countries. Continue reading “Primary Health Care at 30”
Primary Health Care – 30 year update
New studies show solid progress on child survival, including a decline in the annual number of under-five deaths, according to UNICEF. Global child deaths have reached a record low, falling below 10 million per year to 9.7 million, down from almost 13 million in 1990.
“This is an historic moment,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “More children are surviving today than ever before.
Meditations on Measurement
The Bible never assumes that our faculties are limited to our supposed “five senses.”
The Bible assumes that we are able to discern the essential nature of God from creation, and are therefore “without excuse.”
We all have God-given faculties to see the invisible world. We all have a built in microscope. Some of us don’t know its there. Some of us don’t know how to use it and many of us don’t know how to use it to consistently discern the reality of the spiritual dimension around us. (I may fall in this category.)
There is a big difference between rational and rationalism… between empirical and empiricalism. One says that reality can be substantially understood or measured, the later says that IF it cannot be understood or measured, THEN it doesn’t exist.
To be “tangible” means that it can be felt.
So if I can consistently feel or sense the spiritual realm, then it is tangible and no less empirical than anything else. It was a rational, measurable (empirical) process that led Heisenburg to conclude that the Universe was not ultimately measurable.
Even with a real microscope, I cannot train a student to find a TB bacillus every time on a given pathology slide. Sometimes even the lab expert misses what they should have found. And it will always be this way, yet that doesn’t make microscopic lab work somehow “mystical”, only somewhat uncertain.
This week I want the Lord to help me use this faculty more consistently.
Allan Robbins
© March 1999
Well-Baby Clinic
Yeah! We’ve obtained an invitation for our students to work alongside the ongoing immunization and well-baby programs that YWAM-Balut runs on Smokey Mountain. (Their project leaders took the PHC school in Kona a couple years ago and the work here was launched after their field assignment.) Our students not only will gain a better understanding of how organized Well-Child program and clinic runs, but will gain valuable experience and confidence practicing their immunization, growth monitoring and other clinical skills.