Kampang Lampada is a village in the northern part of the state of Sabah, Malaysia. On the day our volunteer medical mission arrived, Lusun people from seventeen nearby villages came to have their illnesses diagnosed and to receive clothing and other basic necessities. At our clinic, they also enjoyed refreshments like bread and mineral water. The government of Sabah was particularly impressed by the haircutting service offered to poor villagers, who until then had paid little attention to their hair. This time, organized group activities, such as haircutting, allowed healthy villagers to participate in the volunteer effort.

Honest, simple people of the earth

When afflicted with common ailments, the Lusun people follow the instructions of their old grannies and look for herbs to cure themselves. If the illness is serious, survival is a matter of luck!

Every morning before the sun rises, the rubber trees on the mountain, spaced like orderly rows of soldiers, are dripping with sap. The collection of latex is the most important daily chore of the Lusun people. By the time the rubber tappers shoulder the day's harvest and return to their villages in the valley, most city dwellers are just getting ready to go to work.

The Lusun people are the largest indigenous group in Sabah. Their lives are simple, dependent on planting crops and collecting latex. With the money they receive from the agricultural ministry of Malaysia for their products, they buy rice and clothing, things they don't have in the mountains. But even though they earn very little money, they do not feel that they lack anything. The tropical rain forest provides them with most of what they need. When they run out of food, they go into the mountains to look for wild fruit and vegetables or to catch fish in the stream. Their clothes may appear shabby and inadequate, and their food plain and simple, but their lives are free and easy.

When they come back from the rubber plantation in the morning, the most important task of a day has been completed. After taking a short rest, the most hardworking ones among them go back into the mountains to plant crops as a means to supplement their income. Those who are more easily content may opt to take a leisurely walk in the mountains--perhaps catch some fish in the streams or look for new usable land. Others choose to work in their own backyards, spending an afternoon in the company of chirping critters and birds.

Sometimes people get together and play songs on their traditional musical instruments. Dancing gracefully with their flexible bodies, the girls do the sumasoh while the boys sing jambatan tamparuli with voices unique to the indigenous people. Old grannies laugh at the boys for their efforts to court the girls, but at the same time they fondly remember how they were attracted to their young men in the same way when they were young. The younger children, both boys and girls, play football on the field beside their small school.

Falling upon hard times

Villagers know that if they contract minor ailments like influenza or the common cold, they can follow the instructions of their elders and go to the mountains to look for herbs to cure themselves. If the illness is so serious that they must see a doctor, other villagers help them board a small truck that charges three and a half ringgit [about US$1] to bring them to a hospital in the nearest town. If they are so sick that they need immediate medical attention, other villagers will carry them on a stretcher to a road where an ambulance can pick them up and take them to a hospital. What happens if there is an accident on the way to the hospital? The villagers shrugged their shoulders helplessly. "Then it's up to luck."

Many times patients die because they do not get to the hospital in time, but there is little they can do about it. When times were good, the state government provided medical treatment to the villagers by occasionally sending a medical van to the villages. It also trained teachers at the schools to draw blood from the patients for diagnosis at the hospital, and to examine them for contagious diseases like dengue fever. The government even addressed the most troublesome of all problems, the delivery of babies. It sent nurses to train women from the villages so that they could help to deliver babies if the mothers could not be sent to the hospital in time.

But recently things have changed. A persistent drought has led to a decline in crop harvests. And even though the government and various non-profit organizations have tried to do their best to help, medical care for villagers has suffered with the onset of the economic crisis in South East Asia.

Due to reduced tax revenues, the government has cut the medical budget. However, this happened just at a time when the general public was turning more and more to government hospitals for treatment instead of consulting private doctors, thereby depleting the already meager medical budget even faster. Naturally, medical care for villagers living high up in the mountains was neglected.

A medical mission with love

Faced with major economic problems, the government of Sabah was helpless. Luckily, however, Sabah officials had come to know the Tzu Chi Foundation in Taiwan, which had offered relief when a hurricane and forest fires hit Sabah in 1997. This time around, Sabah officials took the initiative and invited Tzu Chi to provide free medical treatment for indigenous people living in the mountains.

In March 1998, Tzu Chi representatives visited various villages in the mountains and through surveys identified what the villagers needed most. After learning the needs of the indigenous people, Master Cheng Yen instructed the Tzu Chi Sabah branch to work with the local government to provide free medical treatment for the villagers. By May, preparatory work was in full swing. Eight meetings were held with government officials and various other organizations.

On July 26, a hundred Tzu Chi members from East and West Malaysia and a thousand villagers gathered in a school deep in the mountains. The villagers came to seek treatment. We came to examine our souls…

Mimi's weekend

When Mimi's mother brought her sister for a gynecological exam, Mimi asked curiously: "What is that about?" Instead of an answer, she got a scolding from her mother. "You will know when you are older!" So Mimi ran off to help her father carry things.

For Mimi and her classmates, the weekend must have been unusual. Like most of her classmates, Mimi boards at the school and only goes home on Fridays, when she walks for five hours along a stream to reach her village, Kampang Lampada. On Sunday afternoon she walks the same route to get back to school. Week after week, she makes the same trip.

That weekend, however, she did not go home. She had to stay and help clean the school, shift desks and chairs, and then wait in the poorly furnished hostel for the following day to come. This was because people in blue shirts and white pants had arrived. The people scrubbed every corner of the school building, pitched tents, arranged chairs, put up banners and flags in the playground, and rearranged the desks and chairs in the classroom in a manner Mimi had never seen before. They said that doctors would arrive the following day. Mimi's mother would also bring her younger brothers and sisters to see the doctors. Later on, several Tzu Chi members started to dance and sing: "Hello, hello, I love you, you love me, we all love everybody…" Mimi and her classmate Weiya joined in the dancing and singing.

The next morning, other Tzu Chi members arrived in Kampung Lampada to provide free medical treatment and to distribute basic necessities to the villagers.

People like Mimi's parents and grandmother were examined by doctors in another classroom. People had started to line up early in the morning, and they began registering for their medical checkups at seven thirty. After that they put on blue tags and waited for their turns.

By eight, the sun was already big and hot and the tents erected the previous day came in handy. By then Tzu Chi people who had danced and sung the previous day had also arrived, and they once again invited the local people to join them in frolicking around. One Tzu Chi member was particularly charmed by the happy laughter of Weiya's grandmother and kept mimicking her. At first Weiya's grandma was a bit annoyed, but then in time she also found it amusing. She kept laughing and laughing.

When the doctors were ready to see patients, everybody went into their assigned classrooms, the children into one and the adults into another. Half of a third classroom was used for dispensing medicine. As people collected their medicine, screams came from the other side of the classroom, which had been partitioned off for a dentist to extract teeth. Gynecological exams, such as the one Mimi's sister went to, were given in a classroom up the hill.

As soon as the checkups were over, the children rushed out to the badminton court to collect tins of biscuits, snacks, school uniforms, shoes and school bags. Soon their small hands were so full that they could not even wave and greet people. Apart from being examined by the doctors, the students played with this group of visitors on a field behind the school, their laughter and squeals reverberating in the valleys and mountains. The Tzu Chi volunteers gave Mimi and her family a lot of clothing and other basic necessities. Bread and drinks were served. Mimi was glad that her grandmother would not have to go home with an empty stomach.

Mimi's father and older brother had their hair cut by volunteers under a big tree. Those nice old women were particularly skillful barbers and Mimi's brother got a very nice haircut. Mimi could no longer tease him for the funny hairstyle he used to wear.

After seeing the doctor, collecting the food and having been reminded to study hard, Mimi was ready to go home with her family. As the villagers left the school, the Tzu Chi members stood by the exit, waving and singing songs. "Where do so many of them come from?" Mimi's grandmother asked. "They have such wonderful smiles and they seem so sincere."

At three o'clock in the afternoon, the sky was getting dark. As people were cleaning up, girls from the villages put on their simple dancing costumes and danced the sumasoh. After the place was tidied up, the others joined them in the dance until it started to rain. The Tzu Chi people slowly drove away until they finally disappeared at the far end of the village road. Life would be as usual the next day.

A new experience for Dr. Rao

A sixty-year-old lady who could not sit for long due to dizziness was the first patient to be examined. She had arrived early before the clinic opened for business. Luckily, Dr. Rao Wen-chang, who had also come early with other Tzu Chi members, could talk to her, find out about her symptoms and give her immediate encouragement. It was Dr. Rao's first visit to a village, and it was also the first time that the old woman had ever been able to get free medical care.

Even though Dr. Rao had taken part in many Tzu Chi charitable activities, getting so heavily involved and going to the mountains to treat patients was a new experience for her. It gave her an even better understanding of Tzu Chi and its medical activities.

With the support of her husband, Dr. Rao temporarily left her family behind and readily took part in this volunteer mission. During a pre-departure briefing, she was deeply impressed by the care and the seriousness with which the Tzu Chi members prepared for the task at hand.

On July 26, the day of the mission itself, Dr. Rao noted that the members were happy and full of energy, despite having gotten up at five in the morning. She herself also felt energized and fully prepared to do her duty as a doctor. Grateful for the opportunity to go to the mountains, she worked with enthusiasm and dedication.

"Language was a big problem. I had to use all sorts of ways to find out what the patients were suffering from. I tried my best to learn the local terms for fever, cold and pain, and I tried to become better acquainted with these kind-hearted and simple people." In spite of the language gap and the need for translators, the patients could probably feel the love of the doctors from the way they looked at the patients, from their smiles and their patience.

For Dr. Rao, it was a pleasure to treat these friendly mountain people who were all wearing the "Tzu Chi facial lotion"--a smile. It was true, no matter what they did, the villagers always either smiled shyly or beamed with delight, exposing their crooked, untidy teeth.

Dr. Rao also felt that since many of the illnesses were triggered by psychological problems, she had to identify the root cause before she could properly cure a disease. Therefore, when she examined her patients, she would talk with them about their daily lives in order to prescribe an effective medicine.

One old lady, for example, had a fever and her whole body ached. She had been sent to the hospital many times and she looked heartbroken. With the gentle persuasion of Dr. Rao, she disclosed that she had had all sorts of problems ever since her husband passed away. For a case like this, what mattered most was not the medicine prescribed, but to make her understand that what was past was past and that instead of feeling forlorn and despondent, she had to let bygones be bygones. Only when she was mentally strong would she regain her physical health.