# Barefoot Doctors in China


During this year, I took an amazing class in International Health Policy
with Professor Anne Emanuelle-Birn. The reading package, which was
longer than a bad year (as we say in Norwegian) gave me new insights
each week (as Wojciech would notice, me coming down to his room, eager
to share), and I choose to go on with the second semester seminar course
in International Health. In addition to doing a group project, we each
had to write a paper about a topic that we could choose ourselves. I
chose to pick up on the primary health care movement that we had learnt
about in first semester (if the words “Alma Ata, 1978″ do not mean
anything to you, you could do a lot worse than browsing through
Questioning the Solution, by David Werner, also available [for free
online](http://www.healthwrights.org/books/QTSonline.htm)), and focus on
the Barefoot Doctors movement in China.

I don’t think I have worked so hard on a paper since I wrote my Extended
Essay for [UWC](http://www.uwcad.it) in Italy; this is of course only a
measure of my effort, and not of the resulting quality. However, I do
think the paper is a good introduction to the topic. Where I fail, and
this was also kindly noted by the editors of
[Undercurrent](http://www.undercurrentjournal.ca) after my submission,
is in the analytics. I am planning to try to tighten it up, and put more
analysis in, and resubmitting it to Undercurrent (a Canadian
peer-reviewed undergrad IDS journal).

In the meantime, if anyone should be interested in reading my
concoction, [here it
is](http://reganmian.net/blog/files/Barefoot-Doctors-Stian.pdf). Free
for all. I release it under [Creative Commons
(by)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).

Comments are of course welcome.

Stian