Lessons for the developed--from the Third World

In Indonesia a country comprised of 13,677 islands with a 1984 population of 160 million where 1/2 are less than 20 years old, there are about 300 ethnic groups. A program, called the Family Welfare Movement was implemented to improve family welfare and health care. The Movement had only lay woman members as field representatives who were trained in health nutrition, home projects, and agriculture with a large emphasis on community service and identity. The Movement was used in this study as a platform for a potential health program in the US for people who had cultural difficulties incorporating themselves into US welfare programs. Exploratory data was gained using 88 interviews of Movement members over a 6 week period using different settings, participant observation, and examinations of documents and newspapers. Both passive and active participation in the Movement by the authors were used with the aforementioned data, which was then analyzed in chosen interconnecting categories (i.e. showing initiative, encouraging teamwork, effective leadership, and community participation). After data classification, analysis was undertaken to identify different characteristics which led to similar results, or 1 characteristic that caused different results. Recurrent themes were those identified as societal organization, role of women, cooperation and community self-help, leadership of the Family Welfare Movement, village health workers, and motivational factors in the Movement. Culture bound findings were not used in the application of the Movement to describe how one can create a similar program in the US. The conclusions were: Motivation of sharing and enjoying group activities to bring about communal togetherness could be tried on families living in isolation; volunteerism could be implemented in appropriate US areas; a hierarchical structure with role expectations could be tried on ethnic groups comfortable with hierarchical structuring; and a program concerned with all aspects of individual and family life, from agricultural to health and hygiene should be implemented.