15 June 2009

Victorian churches fund diabetes equipment for Mongolian hospitals

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Adele Nash/Dave Edgren

Seventh-day Adventist churches in Victoria raised $A14,000 in eight weeks to fund diabetes-related equipment for hospitals in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.

The funds paid for 85 blood glucose monitors and a year's supply of testing strips for each. The monitors were given to the Bayanzurkh and Chingeltei hospitals, with 20 other monitors left over to give to church members. The monitors for church members came with two month's worth of strips.

Pastor Harold Waldrip, who ministers to the Yarra Valley Adventist church, spent time in Mongolia from March 29 to April 4 to "deliver" the monitors and train medical students. He conducted six hours of lectures on diabetes for 45 medical students over two days. He says, "We covered types, causes, treatment and complications of diabetes. I also presented information about hypoglycemia, which they didn't know much about."

Pastor Harold Waldrip (front row centre) went to Mongolia
to educate people about the use of the diabetes-monitoring equipment.

Pastor Waldrip also presented four nights of healthy cooking and diabetes information seminars to the community, with around 30 people attending each night.

Pastor Waldrip took a further $A2800 with him in "late donations" and had the money with him on the train on his first day in Mongolia. He was targeted by pickpockets, who stole the money but dropped it when he chased them. "The $A2800 was enough money to buy 14 machines and testing strips for them all," says Pastor Waldrip.

According to Pastor Waldrip, the incidence of diabetes has tripled in the past five years in Mongolia to around 10 per cent of the population. "This higher rate of diagnosis is mostly due to the raised awareness of the condition," he says.

He credits the high level of the disease to the food people have access to. "They can't afford anything else but fat," he says. "People can mainly only afford meat and what's available at the markets is mostly fat. It's almost all white, with just a little strip of red down the middle. They couldn't even afford a banana. They were $US3 per kilo, and that was a horrendous amount of money when you're earning $US70 a week at the most."

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