Our health project operates frequently in the village / regional areas. 

A major challenge we often face is the residents’ aversion to accessing healthcare from hospitals. A few reasons include the cost of travel, cost of medical services, not being able to understand the hospital staff (as the staff do not speak the village dialect), confusion with the health insurance system, or believing they can resolve serious medical issues with traditional/alternative methods.

We have offered to bridge this gap by explaining the importance of getting timely diagnosis / treatment, providing lifts if needed, assisting with interpretation during consults, and teaching them how the health insurance application works.

Currently, we now have at least two village residents, Mrs I and Mrs S, who are getting confident with navigating around the health insurance application. They have been showing other residents how to set it up and use it. They are also assisting with interpretation during medical consults.

We are starting to see a trend where residents require less persuasion to make the trip to the hospital or clinic. They are beginning to access help earlier rather than delaying it until their condition(s) has worsened. This is a work in progress. There are still a few residents with strong evidence of bone fractures that still insist on continuing their regime as prescribed by the traditional medicine practitioner. There are a number of stroke patients who still do not see the need to undergo regular physiotherapy rehabilitation. 

One achievement this past year was the signing of the M.O.U. and sharing of resources with a community clinic. However, this clinic is only open until 2pm and is still far away from a number of villages. This means it is still difficult for some residents to access local health services. One of our long-time local nurses has started a small “clinic” to enable access to basic consults and common prescription medications (e.g. blood pressure, diabetes, antacids, Tuberculosis, etc). This has been approved by the regional health department and will be supported by a local doctor.

We hope to see a trend where more residents are empowered to seek out medical services, understand when it is appropriate to use traditional medicine, and when it’s imperative to access medical intervention. Our team will continue building trust in the communities.

Understanding a new culture and learning its language takes time and effort. Add to that
someone resettling in another country and getting used to new food and climate as well as
having to relearn how to do daily life routines – where to buy groceries, how to use public
transportation, how to fix broken things etc. away from the support of a grown network of
family and friends.

SEEDS is committed to see its consultants and their accompanying family members, who come
from all over the globe, settle well, take roots and thrive in the long haul within their new
culture.

Therefore, a consultant of SEEDS in Indonesia is assigned to support our newly arriving
consultants and their dependents in all aspects of adapting to a new place, language and
culture learning.

We believe that SEEDS projects have lasting impact when founded on trusting relationships that
SEEDS consultants establish with their local partners and communities.

To this end SEEDS considers it mandatory that our consultants become proficient in local
language and culture and spend significant time in formal language and culture study prior to
their project-assignment.

This will help them to communicate well in formal and informal situations, but also to better
understand unspoken meaning and underlying cultural values that influence behaviour and
decision making.

For example, one SEEDS consultant was happy to have papaya seedlings sprouting up in front of
the house. Neighbours started to comment on the papaya trees. The consultant assumed the
neighbours were happy, until one day the house-helper explained that the local people’s belief
is that ghosts live in papaya trees in front of houses. It takes knowledge of language, culture
and trust to get such insights. As a result, the consultant will be cautious offering papaya
seedlings to local people to plant in front of their house…