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My new favorite spot!
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HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!!! For those of you who don’t
know Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday! All of the food and family and the
amazing fall weather, it doesn’t get much better. This year I am spent this lovely day with my
amazing Health 7 Peace Corps Family. Our
Country Director let those of us who were able to stay in our villages for the
first 7 weeks before IST celebrate at her house in Kigali with an actual
American style turkey dinner, pumpkin pie and all! I couldn’t ask for a better group of people
to spend my first Thanksgiving away from home with. We started the day off with an amazing french toast breakfast, a game of baseball and after eating way too much, we all fell into a bit of a food coma. It was an amazing day.
Now, what have I been up to this past month since returning
from IST?? Well, slowly but surely I’m getting some projects started.
Here is the overview of the two main ones:
First 100 Days:
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| Malnutrition screening in Kabingo Village |
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| Cooking demonstration in Kabingo |
My Health group is the guinea pig group in implementing this
project as our primary health project.
Basically what it is, is working with a group of pregnant mothers and
mothers with children under 2 years and promoting a number of topics via
education and one on one home visits in order to promote the reduction of
malnutrition.
The first 1000 days, from
conception until the child is 2 years old are the most critical in prevention
of chronic malnutrition, otherwise known as stunting.
Stunting doesn’t only apply to physical
height but also the stunting of brain development and the ability for the child
to succeed in the future.
Here in Rwanda
the stunting rate for children under 2 is almost 50%.
Clearly no an insignificant number.
What I am planning, and we’ll see how it all
goes, is to start meeting with these future and current mothers to promote Pre
Natal visits to the health center, Good nutrition, and focusing on prevention
of early childhood illnesses.
All will
take a lot of education and dedication to behavior change.
This is just the beginning so there is more
to come as I get things going.
WASH:
This is my main secondary project.
WASH is a Water and Sanitation project done
by many Heath volunteers here.
It is
supported directly through the Ministry of Health of Rwanda and provides a
great way to teach and promote proper hygiene at the village level.
I am working in collaboration with a number
of my fellow H-7 volunteers on this project.
Individually we will create Hygiene Clubs within our respective
populations.
We will hold a training for
District and Sector officials who will then train our Village level
trainers.
These Village level trainers
then put on all of the weekly sessions.
These sessions include topics such as basic handwashing practices along
with how to build handwashing stations, proper waste disposal, and different
disease prevention topics.
What I think
is great about this project is that these lessons are taught to the community
by their own community members.
I’m just
providing the tools and information they need in order to promote hygiene in
their own communities.
We are just in
the beginning stages where I’ll be meeting with District and Ministry level
Officials along with writing a grant for needed materials.
I’m excited to get this up and running, as I
believe I mentioned in a previous post Hygiene is the biggest health issue in
my area.
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| HPV Vaccinations |
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| Distributing Deworming Drugs |
Other than getting those projects up and running I’ve been working
at my health center everyday as usual.
We just got two new services here.
We now have official Pre Natal Services and we are now able to
distribute ARVs to HIV positive patients.
It’s really exciting to see this health center grow. I’ve also been visiting malnutrition
screenings which is always a fun time with all of the kids. And finally I helped out during Mother and
Child Health week where we were able to give deworming drugs to children, iron to pregnant women and HPV vaccines to girls in the
schools. It was great seeing how many
people we were able to help within that one week.
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Girls being vaccinated
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HPV Vaccines
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I hope the holiday season is starting off amazing for everyone. There is a lot coming up with my projects and I am so excited to keep you all posted! I would love to hear from you all too.
~Erika
