It was on efforts to reduce the danger of contaminated fish in the San Francisco Bay. Being a vegetarian, I was a little bored, until they introduced the next expert: Seventh-day Adventist Sophat Sorn (pictured), a pastor in Stockton and founder of Cambodian Families Together.
Apparently he works as a health advocate in the larger Khmer community to educate them about the dangers of eating fish caught in the delta.
Sorn, a small man with
penetrating eyes, gets out of the car. He throws on a fishing cap and a
pair of sunglasses. "This is a very popular spot," he says, snapping
fish advisory pamphlets printed in Khmer to a clipboard. He then traces
a hand along the rocky peninsula, extending down the opposite side of
the channel. "On weekends, they fish from both banks."
The first group we run into is a Cambodian family, a husband and
wife sitting with their two small girls on a blanket covered with
fishing poles and crushed soda cans. Behind them is a rust-pocked
minivan with the hood up and radiator cap removed. At the water's edge
are four poles propped against buckets and small stands. The girls
giggle and point into one of the buckets. A small catfish circles in
the bottom. On the surface floats a dying sunfish. "I caught that one,"
says Santanya, poking at the sunfish and forcing a little blood from
its gills.
[snip]
Sorn is a Cambodian refugee, an
ex-soldier who has become a Seventh-day Adventist minister and health
advocate with a vision: to inform people about the dangers of eating
contaminated fish caught in the waterways around Stockton. For three
years he worked with the California Department of Health's
Environmental Health Investigations Branch, to conduct outreach work
among Cambodian fishers who depend on those fish as a key food source.
Now his ministering takes more time, but he still slows down enough to
speak with local fishers along the waterways and in his congregation to
"spread the gospel of eating fish safely."
That seems a lot like something Jesus would do.
Here's a brief personal history in which he says: “Yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision. But, if we do good deeds today, every yesterday will become a dream of happiness and every tomorrow, a vision of hope. Be careful, therefore, how you use today.”
Campaign for America's Future put out this hard-hitting video in support of the upcoming congressional vote to override Bush's veto of the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
This video is especially good since the few folks who have defended defunding children's health care and attacked young advocates like Graeme Frost as spokespeople forget that their future depends on children too. At least healthy enough for all those photo-ops.
Here's a really interesting American Public Media program on conscientious objectors and the World War II Starvation Study. The participants were by-and-large patriotic conscientious objectors who opposed the killing but risked their lives for research. This radio piece includes some fascinating archival audio and references historic peace churches and Seventh-day Adventists in Takoma Park, MD.
Since SiCKO is now out on DVD no Adventist has to risk angel-abandonment to engage this film.
By Heather Isaacs Royce, a hospice chaplain in Napa, CA.
Documentary. 113 min. PG-13. Now available on DVD.
The ever present good-girl, eldest child in me reeled in horror as I watched Michael Moore’s latest film SiCKO. Important lessons my parents taught me (and I have dutifully followed) about taking responsible care of one’s self—including working a “good job” where your health insurance needs will be met—were undone frame by frame by Moore’s clever and troubling examination of the American health care system. Because, as Moore states in the first five minutes of the film, this is not a movie about the sizable population in the United States who are not insured; this is a movie about people like me who are. Adding to my sense of discomfort, I walked away from the film wondering about my profound ignorance on the state of health care in my own country—never mind the health care systems of other countries. What made bearable the unsettling experience of having my assumptions tested and my ignorance probed was the realization that I am not alone in either case. Apparently, on this issue at least, I am a fairly normal citizen of the United States; that is, I have been grossly uninformed about the state of our health care system. Or, even worse, misinformed.
Moore’s approach in SiCKO is to build his argument for universal health care by linking together stories of personal loss and tragedy resulting from an irreparably broken, even corrupted, American health care system; juxtaposing those stories against an alternative vision of health care being lived out in other countries: Canada, Britain, France, and, most surprising of all, Cuba; and positing systemic change by appealing to the greatest common denominator: a deep regard for human life and dignity that transcends political affiliations and defines American ideals.
The success of Moore’s film is that he manages to keep the human dimension of the health care plight in full view while exposing the terrible brokenness of the American system itself. He could have easily fallen in the direction of making a maudlin tear-jerker of a film or, in the other direction, a spewing cauldron of angry polemic. But the balance he achieves between heart and head results in a compelling argument grounded in personal and political realities. Even my husband, who somewhat reluctantly joined me in seeing the film given his historical distaste for Moore’s insinuating, rhetorical style, was compelled by the sense of truth-telling that characterizes SiCKO.
Smartly, Moore anticipates the questions and concerns that are frequently raised in a discussion of universal health care. The scary world of “socialized medicine” is made a little friendlier with a playful musical aside pointing out that libraries, public schools, firefighters and police are funded by taxes much in the same way as universal health care would be. And the commonly held belief that universal health care compromises the quality and availability of medical treatment is dispelled with evidence to the contrary in cinematic trips to emergency rooms, hospital corridors, and home calls in countries where universal health care is a fact of life. Witnessing the happy and healthy faces of the beneficiaries of these foreign health care systems provided a stark contrast to the litany of horrors voiced from our own: a mother recounts the death of her young daughter after a battle to obtain emergency treatment at a hospital not covered by her insurance provider, a wife mourns the death of her husband after he was denied a life-saving treatment because it was deemed “experimental” by their insurance company, a former medical director at an insurance company confesses her role in denying medically appropriate care to patients for the purpose of saving money and competing for a bonus, a surveillance camera records an ill and disoriented woman in a hospital gown being dumped by taxi at the curb of a shelter because there is no room for her at the hospital.
These and other stories evoked feelings of disbelief and outrage as I began to consider how my country, the wealthiest nation in the world, could allow—even create—these injustices when other countries of supposedly lesser means are able to meet the health care needs of their citizens. And I was humbled as I watched 9/11 rescue workers with serious and chronic health care issues receive free, competent, and humane treatment in Cuba. The cognitive dissonance I experienced was palpable: How could this be Cuba? You mean, a third-world country led by a dictator is able to provide inexpensive, quality health care to its people and my own country can’t? Seeing this reversal of roles, the strong becoming the vulnerable, the enemy becoming the friend evoked a sense of hope and compassion that I would best describe as a movement of the Spirit.
And if SiCKO convinced me of anything it is this: our crisis of health care is not only a political issue, it is a spiritual one. Perhaps if Americans began to engage in the health care debate with this truth in mind, the necessary political corrections would follow. Other countries have already taken the lead in aligning universally shared spiritual values of compassion and human dignity with political will and action. One Canadian woman interviewed by Moore in a hospital emergency room reflected on the health care system of her country, saying, “it’s a fabulous system to make sure the least of us and the best of us are taken care of.” In this and other statements in the film, it is hard not to hear echoes of Matthew 25 where Jesus’ definition of righteousness is to simply serve the “least of these.” But as Moore points out, it is not simply the “least” of us who are in need; where health care in America is concerned, most of us are in need.
I was looking for Busta Rhymes's or Flipmode's "sanitarium" lyric (anyone know the song?) and found this from The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley (1964).
. . .Time went by, and some folks tried to help. The Seventh Day Adventists were an encouragement to Malcolm's mother.
"Meanwhile, the state Welfare people kept after my mother. By now, she
didn't make it any secret that she hated them, and didn't want them in
her house. But they exerted their right to come, and I have many, many
times reflected upon how, talking to us children, they began to plant
the seeds of division in our minds. They would ask such things as who
was smarter than the other. And they would ask me why I was 'so
different.'" [Malcolm was lighter than his brothers and sisters, but
also at the time, getting into more trouble.]
"I think they felt that getting children into foster homes was a
legitimate part of their function, and the result would be less
troublesome, however they went about it."
"And when my mother fought them, they went after her -- first, through
me. I was the first target. I stole; that implied I wasn't being taken
care of by my mother." [p 21]
The state Welfare people attacked and ridiculed Malcolm's mother on
account of her dietary practices, eschewing "gifts" of pork and other
food objectionable to Seventh Day Adventists.
"They were as vicious as vultures. They had no feelings, understanding,
compassion, or respect for my mother. They told us, 'She's crazy for
refusing food.' Right then was when our home, our unity, began to
disintegrate. We were having a hard time, and I wasn't helping. But we
could have made it, we could have stayed together. As bad as I was, as
much trouble and worry as I caused my mother, I loved her."
But wait, health care is our baby -- from Ellen White's Ministry of Healing, Loma Linda University, our network of hospitals and our strong public health reputation to our mission institutions and short-term junkets around the world. Without our medical professionals, we'd be a smaller, dumber, sicker church. Sans THE HEALTH MESSAGE we'd be less globalized and less institutional; Weimar probably wouldn't exist, but on the other hand our colleges would be bible schools -- they had to be accredited in the 1910s and 20s so our doctors and nurses would be certified by the emerging professional orgs.
During the health care boom of the 1980s, Roy Branson asked on the cover of Spectrum: what's a little church like ours doing in big health care? Now how are we doing a couple of decades later -- ethically, financially, mission-wise. The church runs 167 hospitals and sanitariums, 125 nursing homes and retirement centers and 449 clinics and dispensaries, according to the '05 statistics report. SiCKO is out now and each year more and more Americans -- whether they like Moore or not -- realize that some form of serious change is required, not just of our for-profit system but our personal health as well. Here's a good WaPo piece entitled "I Treat the Patients that Michael Moore Forgot."
What does change mean for our Adventist health system, our mission, and our denomination? Whither our ministry of healing? And could temperance also mean "single-payer" and "nation-wide?" Johnny reviews the film.
A couple of years ago Adventist filmmaker Paul Kim shot a documentary on the young medical team who operate a remote AHI hospital in Tchad. It got a lot of attention at the (lamely named) SONsceen Film Festival. I caught the film at the 2005 GC session and found Kim's storytelling and the modern ministry of the main characters very inspiring.
This clip -- not from the documentary -- focuses on Samedi, "a nurse who started out as a janitor at a
small bush hospital in rural Chad and after working 28 years there has
so much experience
that during the years when there was no doctor at the hospital was able
to save many lives by doing emergency surgeries in addition to all his
other duties."
One of the things I appreciate about the mission itself is the less-mediated attitude of the young team who work there. It is a pretty raw story.
Loma Linda University graduate Dr. James Appel writes:
Meanwhile, in Béré, Noel, André and the rest were preparing to leave
church when a raging man broke in violently and tried to attack our
chaplain. Before he could reach Noel, he was restrained and Noel was
quickly ushered into a back room. The man was identified as the son of
one of our janitors and was finally convinced to return home. Noel
continued on to the hospital to see the patients and was followed by
this man. When it was seen that he was heading for the hospital, the
gatekeeper quickly locked the gate and Noel hid inside. The man jumped
the fence, now armed with a knife. As he ran around hunting for Noel,
the hospitalized patients' caregivers fought him off with sticks,
brooms, and anything else they could get their hands on to keep him
away from Noel. Finally, Andre was able to contact the gendarmes who
came and subdued him, but not before he had stabbed and destroyed one
of the two air conditioners in the operating rooms (the only two on
campus and necessary for surgery in this hot climate). The man was
taken to prison where he struggled so hard he managed to break one of
their doors before finally being locked up.
That same day, it is
discovered that our Accountant, Ganota, who we'd just fired for
embezzeling, has managed to sneak into the garage and steal five
bicycles, several large cooking pots and a generator. Somehow, he'd
broken in the back door and little by little been carrying things off.
We onlyfound out because these items were left by patients as
collatoral for their hospital debts and one came back to reclaim his
bike only to find it wasn't there. Andre and Pierre were able to go to
the market and find that that very day Ganota had packed all the stuff
up to ship to his home town of Lere and they were able to recover all
the lost items. A warrant was immediately put out on Ganota who managed
to slip through the fingers of the gendarmes.
Allan Brandt
researched "The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly
Persistence of the Product That Defined America," and after doing so
for twenty years, he has become one of the top expert witnesses for
tobacco-related state and federal cases. In 2004 Brandt took the stand
as an expert witness for two full days of cross-examination in the case
of U.S. vs. Phillip Morris. The judge's opinion referenced Brandt's
testimony nearly 200 times and for the first time ever tobacco
companies were found to be in violation of Federal racketeering
statutes.
Now, in "The Cigarette Century," Brandt presents the
definitive history of the cigarette, both as the ultimate cultural icon
and as the produce that shaped US agriculture, big business, medicine,
and regulatory policies in the 20th century. Making extensive use of
previously secret corporate documents which became available in the
last decade as a result of litigation, Brandt offers critical analysis
of the cigarette controversy and how the industry used sophisticated
public relations to invent a modern "disinformation" campaign. --
Cody's Books
Allan Brandt is the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of
the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and holds a joint
appointment in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard
University.
A recent survey by the Adventist Development and Relief Agency
(ADRA) showed that a tobacco control policy will receive enormous
support in Cambodia, local media said on Wednesday.
Over 90 percent interviewers supported the government's
adoption of a law on tobacco control, according to the survey of a
sample of 144 staff members from the ministries of Education, Youth and
Sport, Women's Affairs, and Defense across the country. [snip] According to official statistics, more than 70 percent of the
Cambodian families spend over 10 percent of their incomes on cigarettes
and a pack of locally produced cigarettes costs as much as one kilogram
of husked rice.
The World Health Organization (WHO) once stated that each year
about 5 million people die of tobacco-related diseases worldwide and
the figure could increase to 10 million by 2020.
Taking our public temperance witness seriously, Adventist leaders, such as former Spectrum editor Roy Branson,
have been very active in working with health and consumer groups to
limit the reach of tobacco advertising and raise cigarette taxes.
By Alexander Carpenter 
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