 On Tech on Spectrum OSI 16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to Tech and to Hawaii. I'm Arby Kelly. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. In our show this time, we'll learn about the trip Aloha Medical Mission recently made to Bangladesh. It was much more than medicine. It was also social services, microloans, infrastructure, and education to help the people there. We all know Aloha Medical Mission. It's a Hawaii non-profit organized years ago, at first to provide medical help to people in the rural Philippines. Then we found it was helping people in Nepal, that it has been providing dental services to local people here in Palama. And most recently we found it has been helping people in Bangladesh too. Craig Thomas is a doctor with Hawaii Emergency Physicians Associates, HEPA, a medical practice group in Hawaii. Craig has been involved with Aloha Medical Mission for some years. He was the leader of the recent trip to Bangladesh and the person who told us how it went. Craig is the host of our much more on medicine show, which plays at 10 a.m. every Wednesday on Think Tech. He spoke about his trip to Bangladesh on a recent episode, so we decided to find out more and get a handle on this interest in Aloha Medical Mission and Bangladesh. And with me today, Tony Meranaka and Carly Creutzfeldt from the Aloha Medical Mission. Thank you. Thanks for coming. So the Aloha Medical Mission, in full disclosure, I've been involved since I think 1991, I've forgotten exactly. And over that time it's evolved substantially. When I started, and it's how I started, we were doing medical missions, sort of what people think of when it's a medical mission. You get together a crew of folks, usually some interventional folks like classic surgeons, ophthalmologists, general surgeons, ER docs, and a whole bunch of support staff. You get a whole bunch of boxes full of stuff. You sort of assault customs and whatever the country is, you end up and they shake their heads and wave you through. And you go to some place in need of service. You engage the local providers and facility and do a lot of cool stuff, to be honest. And that was the core of Aloha Medical Mission. So I was founded and it's what it's done for years and what it still does. But over the years it's also developed a couple other things and that's really what we're going to focus on today. So one of the challenges as I see it in improving health, especially with a primarily volunteer and donation supported organization, is you have to be able to identify a need that you can obtain resources to address both sort of skill-wise but also funding-wise and match those up. And Hawaii, honestly, has very good healthcare coverage for almost everybody. We are I think the second best state in the nation in that, following Massachusetts. So that's fabulous. Dental care, not so much. And so there's the need. And thanks to HDS and a number of other local donors, there's the resource. And I know that the dental clinic has been a major effort on both your parts. Why don't we start with you, Tony? What you pointed out is very true. Dental care is a stepchild to healthcare. And so there is a huge need. So around 2002 we developed a clinic and we wanted to do so much for the community and one way to do it is to have volunteers. So we have 16 highly skilled professional volunteers that do dentistry. And people wonder, how do you do this for free? It's because, like you mentioned, the wonderful funders, all the individual donors that come in and help us. So there's a lot involved. Not only do we do patient care for dental, we also have educational components. And one of them is called for a smile. We go into the elementary schools, the preschools as well. And we educate them how to take care of their teeth, which is really important. And then also we have a program called Welcome Smile. So that is for women who had been incarcerated or abused. And so we provide them with free restorative dental work. So it's really neat that we're able to give back that way. And I've seen some of the before and after pictures and it's quite stunning the difference. And what you said about good dentition being key to health is definitely true. And in fact there's some evidence that bad dentition is associated not only with, it hurts, hard to eat your food, but even things like heart disease, which is kind of surprising. But the body is a more integrated entity than most of us recognize. And as an ER doc, I am well aware how difficult it is to get somebody hooked up with dental services. So this is a real need. Yeah, but we also have outreach. So one of the outreach works is where Carly comes in. I came here through AmeriCorps. So I'm at, actually, Loha Medical Mission through AmeriCorps VISTA. And VISTA stands for Volunteers in Service to America. And then AmeriCorps is a federally funded national program. So they place VISTAs within local nonprofits all around the US. And the goal is to help build capacity of those clinics or of those organizations and also help them work towards breaking the cycle of poverty. So specifically with Loha Medical Mission, it's helping patients who don't have dental insurance or are underinsured. Along with that, they may not have the funds to be able to afford dental care, but then also. Over the years, it become obvious that medicine wasn't everything and that the people of these areas needed more than just medicine. They needed social services. They needed microcredit. They needed water and housing projects. And more than anything, they needed schools for their kids. So Craig and his friends started other projects, social services, microcredit projects, infrastructure projects, and schools to help the people there. For that purpose, they formed a Bangladeshi corporation called Loha Social Services and they really meant it. For this trip, Craig went in a group of four and brought back lots of pictures and movie clips. Let's look at those and talk with him to find out how things went, what they did there, what they learned in the process, and what it all means for him. There are really three different kinds of projects in Loha Medical Mission. And it started off, my involvement started in 1991. It had been going for a few years before that. Ramon C had set it up. I think Brad came in about the same time I did. And it was a pretty typical medical mission kind of setup. You know, you got a bunch of providers, ideally ones that could do sort of schedulable elective semi-elective procedures, so ophthalmology, doing cataract extractions, plastic surgeons doing cleft lips, general surgeons doing sort of semi-elective things. Because of course, things like appendectomies, you can't schedule. And you'd go somewhere, usually the Philippines in those days, but a number of other places too. And kind of take over a local hospital and do your stuff for a week. And there was a lot of good impact. There's a lot of impact too. Taking over a hospital is not without challenges and harm too. You know, you disrupt a lot of things. So I did that for a few years. I went to some interesting places, Vanuatu, for example, China, and ultimately Bangladesh. And when we got to Bangladesh, similar sort of setup, we actually were traveling by boat sometimes. Some amazing things happened. We took a boat to the middle of nowhere, Bangladesh is mostly water, and had a feast. And in the middle of the table was a large pot. And in the middle of that was a goat's head. And that was the centerpiece of the feast, which was pretty interesting. You eat, of course, with your hands, so that made it more interesting. Yeah, so the great thing about it was people were wonderful. We did some medical good. But it became pretty clear that the health problems were primarily not medical. They were nutrition, access to food, water, clean water, shelter, and the wherewithal to make a living. So the first thing we did was set up a clinic focused on women and children in Old Dhaka, which is a fascinating, crowded, wonderful place. And this enabled us to give nutritional advice and, in fact, supplements, food to kids, and to chart their growth and look for trouble. And we staffed this with local physicians, so it was a year-round operation. This went on for a couple of years. And then 20 years ago, we formed an NGO over there called Oloha Social Services, Bangladesh, because we felt that the scope needed to be larger than just medicine. And about the same time, Old Dhaka got really, really crowded. It was merely really crowded before. And we were offered an opportunity to move to Denajpur, which is in the northwest of the country. It's quite rural, which should not be confused with un-crowded, but it's agricultural. And, as I said, quite rural. And set up our, moved our clinic up there, which was wonderful. And we were able to get a local physician to work year-round. And for the first year or two, we kind of came. Did medicine, mostly cases that were selected in advance. We introduced an operating microscope for cataract extractions, which was the first one in the whole northern part of the country. It was a really big deal. And experienced the same thing. How are we going to feed the kids? How are we going to clothe the kids? So we opened a preschool. It was great. The kids came in, got a little uniform. They got medical evaluation, and they got lunch every day. It was fabulous. They were cute as my. And excited to come. Well, you can't have preschool in there. You can't biff them after preschool. So pretty soon, we had first grade and then second grade. And now we have a number of graduates. So that's how it started. It also became obvious that we needed to be doing something for their parents. And Bangladesh pioneered microcredit. The Grameen Bank was the beginning of that, and about 20 years before we got there. So we didn't invent anything. On the other hand, the Grameen Bank's penetration, although good, is by no means universal. And that's because microcredit is challenging. You can't just give out loans. You actually have to provide business support and mentoring. And it's quite labor-intensive. So in the catchment areas where our clinic served, and ultimately a couple other ones, the NGO set up microcredit programs. And thanks to the really capable people working over there, they also were able to attract other partners, both locally within Bangladesh, Lyons, for example, which is funding intraocular lens implants. They're going to do 600 this year, which is impressive. But also a number in Europe. And this allowed building schools, a little medical mission made it possible to build a hospital. And it's grown. It's been an exciting, fantastic experience. The great thing about going to Bangladesh, it makes you realize how little of what we think is essential matters. And I would say that the people are doing OK in Bangladesh, which now is most people. When we started 20 years ago, it was fewer. But are the people doing OK? And by that, I mean they're eating. And they have a roof over their heads. And hopefully they have some sort of gainful occupation. I think those people are pretty much as happy as people here. I think everyone who's gone experiences gratification. It's highly rewarding to see kids go through. And we've been doing this for 20 years. So kids have graduated. Kids have gone on to college. We have a little scholarship program. And when I say we, there are nine, as I think I mentioned earlier, different NGOs supporting various aspects of this. There are also three Bangladeshi NGOs and a couple of government entities too. So collectively, the whole is much greater than some of the parts. But if you see somebody who's had nothing, who gets an education, gets a job, gets a family, can support them as a house, it's a wonderful thing. And we brought it early on. We brought a couple of kids back to Shriners. And they had their club feet repaired. And this time we met one of these kids. He's now 25 or 26, met his wife, met his eight-month-old child. It's a wonderful thing to see. So it's tremendously gratifying. It was a great trip. Good for Aloha Medical Mission, good for Craig and the others in the group, and good for Hawaii. It demonstrated their continuing generosity and kindness in making these trips and in helping people on the other side of the world. The clinic has turned into a year-round hospital. The microcredit program has attracted 11,000 members and 8,000 microloans with nine funding sources from around the world. Water and housing projects have been built. And the school is way bigger, with lots more kids and grades than before. There are now 600 kids in that school. Some 250 people are now engaged in these projects, including the hospital, the microloans, the water and housing projects, and the school. It has been great for the people in that part of Bangladesh. It's a good deed many times over and over many years. In fact, this is the 20th year of Craig's efforts in Bangladesh. We should all be doing things like this, either in Bangladesh or right here at home. We should be expressing our generosity and kindness in the same way wherever we are and especially for those less fortunate. After all, we're from Hawaii. For us, that's what it's all about. We gotta say, this is all pretty cool. And from Hawaii, an ambitious and daunting challenge successfully executed by intrepid medical and social alterists who have made remarkable progress and enjoyed tremendous personal gratification in the process. We gotta give Craig and Aloha Medical Mission big kudos for what they've done. Wanna know more about what they've done? Check out their website. It includes the most recent annual report of their activities, and you'll see what we mean. And now let's check out our ThinkTech schedule of events going forward. ThinkTech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show, or if you wanna replay or share any of our shows, throw our archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to ThinkTechHawaii.com slash audio. And we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links. Or better yet, sign up on our email list and get our daily email advisories. ThinkTech has a high tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you wanna see it or be part of our live audience or if you wanna participate in our shows, contact shows at ThinkTechHawaii.com. If you wanna pose a question or make a comment during a show, call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on ThinkTech. And we're always looking for new shows. Most recently, we added outside the lines hosted by Rusty Kamori, which covers leadership issues and advice in Hawaii. It plays at 10 a.m. on Mondays and you can find the episodes on the Outside the Lines playlist. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at ThinkTechHI. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands and in this country. We wanna stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech, but first we wanna thank our underwriters. The Atherton Family Foundation, Castle and Cook, Hawaii. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, Collateral Analytics, The Cook Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, Hawaiian Electric Companies, the High Tech Development Corporation, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Integrated Security Technologies, Kamehameha Schools, Dwayne Kurisu, Calamon Lee and the Friends of ThinkTech, MW Group Limited, the Schuyler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, the Volo Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Okay, Cynthia. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Cynthia does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit thinktecawaii.com, be a guest or a host, a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii and of course the ongoing search for innovation wherever we can find it. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Marbie Kelly. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. Aloha everyone.