Last week I returned from 1.5 weeks of training in Parakou and decided to hit the ground running and get some projects started in my village. Here's a look at what I did:
Health education sessions: Three days a week, women come to the health center and wait for hours for their pre-natal visits or baby vaccinations. Essentially, this means that I have my primary target group as a captive audience for extended periods of time. I decided to take advantage of this fact and start teaching health topics to the women while they wait to be served. My colleagues and I taught more than 100 women about mosquito net use and 60 about HIV transmission. From now on, we hope to teach health topics at every such opportunity.
Baby weighings: The eight-hour wait on vaccination day also afforded me the perfect opportunity to start weighing babies. I hooked the baby scale up to a tree limb and weighed 60 babies. When the pharmacist was available, she served as a translator and helped me provide nutritional advice to mothers. We found four moderately malnourished babies and two severely malnourished babies. I plan to weigh babies every week on vaccination day and have some ideas for opportunities to weigh babies outside of the health center.
Girls' Club: I met the middle school principal and he agreed to help me start a girls' club. The ultimate objective of the club is to keep girls in school. This will undoubtedly require addressing unwanted pregnancy, which is the biggest reason girls drop out of school, according to the principal.
English Club: I offered my services to the middle school English department and agreed to start a weekly English club to help students improve their English.
Elementary schools: I spoke with the principals at all three elementary schools to propose giving health lessons to their students. I consider students to be a great vector for health information because they can pass the information on to their families, plus they are the generation of the future. Since their schooling is in French, I am able to work with them without a translator. The principals were enthusiastic about the idea and all agreed to give me a weekly time slot. I will address groups of up to 500 students at a time. I gave my first lesson on Thursday: I taught 73 students about hand washing.
Amour et Vie: I met with my Amour et Vie team to plan our first health education session. The two Amour et Vie peer educators will teach health topics in our community. Another villager and I will serve as their coaches.
Moringa: I planted my first moringa seed. If it grows successfully into a moringa tree, it will be the basis of a moringa nutrition initiative in the future.
Those are just a few projects to get me started. I have much more up my sleeve for the future.
Health education sessions: Three days a week, women come to the health center and wait for hours for their pre-natal visits or baby vaccinations. Essentially, this means that I have my primary target group as a captive audience for extended periods of time. I decided to take advantage of this fact and start teaching health topics to the women while they wait to be served. My colleagues and I taught more than 100 women about mosquito net use and 60 about HIV transmission. From now on, we hope to teach health topics at every such opportunity.
Baby weighings: The eight-hour wait on vaccination day also afforded me the perfect opportunity to start weighing babies. I hooked the baby scale up to a tree limb and weighed 60 babies. When the pharmacist was available, she served as a translator and helped me provide nutritional advice to mothers. We found four moderately malnourished babies and two severely malnourished babies. I plan to weigh babies every week on vaccination day and have some ideas for opportunities to weigh babies outside of the health center.
Girls' Club: I met the middle school principal and he agreed to help me start a girls' club. The ultimate objective of the club is to keep girls in school. This will undoubtedly require addressing unwanted pregnancy, which is the biggest reason girls drop out of school, according to the principal.
English Club: I offered my services to the middle school English department and agreed to start a weekly English club to help students improve their English.
Elementary schools: I spoke with the principals at all three elementary schools to propose giving health lessons to their students. I consider students to be a great vector for health information because they can pass the information on to their families, plus they are the generation of the future. Since their schooling is in French, I am able to work with them without a translator. The principals were enthusiastic about the idea and all agreed to give me a weekly time slot. I will address groups of up to 500 students at a time. I gave my first lesson on Thursday: I taught 73 students about hand washing.
Amour et Vie: I met with my Amour et Vie team to plan our first health education session. The two Amour et Vie peer educators will teach health topics in our community. Another villager and I will serve as their coaches.
Moringa: I planted my first moringa seed. If it grows successfully into a moringa tree, it will be the basis of a moringa nutrition initiative in the future.
Those are just a few projects to get me started. I have much more up my sleeve for the future.
You have a really ambitious agenda for yourself. Thinking about, planning for, will really keep you busy. Even keeping a schedule could be a challenge. Then there will be other avenues that come to mind as you teach. Wow!!! Your training sessions really got you fired up!
ReplyDeleteHow do you account for malnourished babies? I assume the mothers are nursing. Are the mothers malnourished, working too hard, or the babies not fed enough when ready for solid food?
Jean Ralley
My primary work partner in village announced to me two weeks ago that we couldn't do anything for a month because he would be too busy, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
ReplyDeleteAs for baby weighing, four or five of the malnourished babies were under six months, meaning they should be exclusively breastfed. Many local mothers give water or herbal tea to their babies (which, unbeknownst to the mothers, is contrary to best health practices), but all of the mothers in question claimed they do not. The issue at hand could be related to the mother, such as not eating well enough or working too hard, as you said. It may also be a question of nursing technique, such as not letting the baby nurse long enough or switching to the second breast before emptying the first. Some Beninese babies end up malnourished because their mothers don't know that the nature of the milk changes as the breast is emptied out, so they don't let their babies nurse on one breast long enough to get the rich milk released toward the end.
Two of the malnourished babies were twins, so that probably contributed to their malnutrition, even though breast milk works on supply and demand and can adapt to feeding two.
I think I have found a willing partner to go out to Peuhl encampments in the countryside and I would like to weigh babies there. I imagine a fair amount of malnourishment goes undetected there. I have also heard that the new nurse wants to start doing vaccinations in nearby villages (this is actually a government requirement that my health center has ignored for the last year), so I would like to tag along for those outings and weigh babies then as well.