July
6, 1996
Faith
helped woman pioneer basic health care
BOB
HARVEY RELIGION & ETHICS
It may not be the way she
chooses to be remembered, but Dr. Ethel Martens is probably the only
woman ever to have had little houses named after her all across the
Canadian North.
Ethel's Houses were the nickname hundreds of Indian and Inuit health
workers gave to the privies she taught them to construct in their home
communities throughout the 1960s.
In a way, it's an appropriate reflection of her life's work as one of
the world's founders of primary health care, the training of community
workers in basics like sanitation, clean water supplies and infant
nutrition.
The term primary health care hadn't even been invented when Martens
became the federal government's first health educator in
1958. It was a new profession then, and the health care
system she pioneered became a model for others around the world.
On Thursday, Martens, 79, was honored by the Ottawa Baha'i community
for a lifetime of service to others.
She left the federal government in 1973 to help the World Health
Organization establish a new health education program at a university
in Cameroon. But even after she returned to Canada and
retired in 1978, Martens continued working as a volunteer in the Baha'i
International Health Agency she founded. Until 1993, when she
broke her back in Burundi, she trained Baha'i volunteers in 15
countries in Africa, Asia and South America.
Martens became a Baha'i more than 40 years ago. She says
that, although she grew up in a strong Anglican family in Manitoba,
Baha'i won her with its stress on unity among all religions, and the
oneness of all humanity.
As she talked in her living room one day this week about her work and
her faith, three lessons emerged:
- Faith makes a difference. She says the Baha'i health
workers she's trained have much lower drop-out rates than other health
workers. The job of a community health worker isn't always
easy, because it involves not only helping and teaching, but also
pushing for health-care improvements. The Baha'i health
workers stick with it because of their faith commitment, she says.
- Principles learned in a faith context have a wider
application. Martens says she adapted many Baha'i principles
to her health care teachings, including the use of consultation instead
of confrontation. She taught community workers not to demand
change from authorities, but to present their problems, then ask how
they could work together on a solution. "When you give out an
idea," she says, "it's no longer your idea. It gets thrown in
the pot with other ideas, like a stew. You end up with
something much more tasty."
- Programs often have unintended consequences. Martens says
primary health care brings power to the people. Rural peoples
learned first to demand changes in their health care, next demanded
political change. The first place she saw primary health care
at work was in Chiapas, Mexico, the site of the 1994 Zapatista
uprising. Martens says the revolution in the Philippines that
overthrew Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 also began among health-care
workers. Canada's First Nations peoples are also more
aggressive today in demanding such things as self government.
Martens believes her work helped encourage that.
She says that's what's most important about her work: "I changed a lot
of attitudes."
Printed in the The Ottawa
Citizen,1996, July 6
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