Published by: World Tibet Network News, Wednesday September 4 1996

XIGAZE (Sept. 2) XINHUA - China has once again redoubled its efforts to train a new contingent of barefoot doctors - with help from the International Red Cross.

And the Swiss-based Red Cross is even buying horses - or bicycles - so that the new generation of health providers do not have to go barefoot.

About 500 people, mainly from poor rural areas where medical help is scarce, have been trained to provide health care for people in their isolated villages.

China's Tibet Red Cross and the International Red Cross drew up the plan to create an army of "rural charitable staff members" to improve medical service for local women and children, a local official said.

The Red Cross paid its first visit in 1988 to Xigaze, a city west of Tibet's capital, Lhasa, at the invitation of the late tenth Panchen Lama and the China Red Cross. Since then it has offered aid of about eight million yuan to the area.

Most of the trainees were from remote areas, where medical services are poor, and which lacked both money and well-trained doctors, a local red cross official said.

After training, trainees are required to return to their home villages and work for local people, he said.

The International Red Cross paid for the trainees' uniforms, medicines, medical equipment, and horses or bikes for those working in areas with less developed traffic.

The trainees are expected to work as "bare-foot doctors", who were prevalent in China's countryside in the late 1960s and the 1970s, according to Canmuqoi, a woman principal of the District Medical School.

Many of the original barefoot doctors have retired, or changed their jobs. As a result, medical services became poorer in the region's farming and stock breeding areas.

Red Cross officials often investigated the work of its staff members to make sure that their medical work improved, the local Red Cross official said.

Thomas Zeindl and Anne Cronin, the fourth group of resident representatives of the Xigaze Office of the Red Cross arrived in Tibet last year. The couple expressed satisfaction with the work of the members of the Xigaze Red Cross.

"We are volunteers, and we love Tibet and Tibetan people," Zeindl said. In Tibet, it is no easy to spread medical and health services in Tibet which covers a vast area but is sparsely populated. The new team of medical workers of Xigaze have brought great changes to the area and, without their help, we could do nothing, Zeindl added.