Village Responder is a vision that has evolved over a decade and has been fostered by many committed people and partners. In 2009 a group of community members hosted a small Wilderness First Responder course in Laplapan, Bali, Indonesia.
The WFR teaches advanced medical first response for outdoor guides and is a required guide certification for many international schools, mountaineering and river organisations. The first Bali class was a mix of expatriate and Indonesian adults and young adults from the Green School community. In that first class were the co-founders of Village Responder plus, Nikki Macfarlane, founder of Childbirth International, Joe Yaggi owner of Jungle Run Productions, Alex Ryan of Kaltimber and Ibu Robin Lim, founder of the Bumi Sehat Foundation - who have all become incredible supporters of this project.
Also in that first course was 14-year-old Dillon Carpenter-Dorworth. Dillon was so inspired that he became a Bumi Sehat volunteer for local disaster relief and co-founded Village Responder. He became a Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician at age 18 and, after graduating as part of Green School’s first graduating class, became a Paramedic. Dillon now works full time as a medical and dive instructor in Indonesia. See Dillon’s 2013 Greenstone - Where There Is No 911.
In the following years, the training from that first WFR and the ones that followed was used continually by community members who supported each other through car and motorbike accidents, heart attacks, dengue fever, typhoid outbreaks and pneumonia, as well as the parasites, cuts, scabies and flu that make up daily tropical life. The training was especially valuable because, like many countries, Indonesia has a very limited medical infrastructure and emergency medical system.
Through these collective experiences, we have learned an amazing amount about what communities like Bali need. Over the years, we have added material specific to international medicine to our course and expanded it far beyond a guide certification. We now call it the International First Responder (IFR).
Village Responder is a collaboration to take the lessons learned from one community’s experience and create an organised training that brings the depth and accessibility of a WFR together with the unique needs of a medically resource-poor environment. The goal is to empower communities and individuals to become strong, self-reliant and take responsibility for their own medical wellbeing. Through our courses, Village Responder is changing lives and strengthening the social fabric in villages of all shapes and sizes, worldwide.