Serving the Community
Background
SG Venture Consulting was a continuation of a wholly foreign-owned provincial level company – Yunnan Venture Consulting Solution Pte Ltd which was registered in Yunnan, China in 2005. It was shut down in 2012 as the founder decided to return to back to Singapore.
In Yunnan, Yunnan Venture Consulting Solution Pte Ltd has been involved in sustainable community development work. It started off conducting training at the Kunming Medical College for a group of county government officials on Community Development, and later was invited to look into some of the challenges faced by a Muslim autonomous region.
The issue was a major Fluoride poisoning issue that has plagued the county for generation resulting in the children having Dental Fluorosis. Dental Fluorosis caused the children to have blacken teeth and later no teeth at a young age. Adults will get Skeletal Fluorosis which is a deformation of the skeletal structure. The government officials said it must be the drinking water and it has been for generation.
Patrick decided to double-check on the cause of the issue and conducted water test at various water source locations to check on the Fluoride level, and found that the water was actually not contaminated at all. Next, he decided to investigate on how did the Fluoride enters into the villagers bodies, and conducted a study on the lifestyle of the villagers and what are the common food items, and he collected various samples to mix with water and conducted water test for Fluoride. In the tests, he found high Fluoride present in the dried chili and corns, and started to take samples of the raw chili and corns but could not find any trace of Fluoride, so he decided to look into the processes used in making the dried chili and corns, and discovered the villagers dried them with the natural coal they dug out from the ground. From the test of these coals, it was found the Fluoride level was very high, and it seems the Fluoride contaminated the chili and corns during the drying process.
After this finding, training was conducted to change the processing method and the introduction of stove with chimney for the households, and much educations to avoid using the coal for cooking.
Apart from this project, other initiatives were rolled out and one was getting the families to release the girls to study in schools. There were about 250 girls who were not studying and we used Summer camps and house visitations to talk to the families and sponsoring their children’s education.
Through the house visitations, the Cattle of Hope project was birthed. It started off with one cattle – the Chinese Yellow cow bred with frozen sperm from a US beef cattle bred from the animal husbandry clinic, a project the Chinese authority wanted to roll out. With the Cattle of Hope project, the roll out was successful and turned into a cooperative revolving microenterprise model which helped over 200 households during the pilot run of the project.
