Over the last several years, the village health team in Ajoya has become increasingly concerned with the social, economic, and political factors that affect the health of the poor. They have also come to realize that the people’s attitudes about themselves, their situation, and their possibilities are deeply affected by the kind of education they receive. What and how children (or village health workers) are taught has a lot to do with the way the poor end up looking at themselves and their world. Health is more dependent on politics and education than on medicineand vaccines.

Gradually, the Ajoya health team has been developing an approach to learning and teaching that helps everyone—instructors, health workers, villagers, and children—relate to each other as equals. They try to use methods that help people value their own experiences, analyze their situation, build on local traditions, and work together toward change.

Many of the teaching methods and aids that have been developed over the past several years in Ajoya, along with ideas from other community-based health programs in other parts of the world, form the basis for a new book by David Werner and Bill Bower. This book is called Helping Health Workers Learn. It has been prepared as a companion volume to Where There Is No Doctor (now translated into at least 17 languages and being used in over 100 developing countries as a training and work manual for community health workers). With this newsletter, we enclose an announcement of Helping Health Workers Learn and an order form.