Health: Outreach in Mwazaro
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| Mother and baby |
The health team and I ventured to a village
called Mwazaro, a 15 minutes drive from our base Shimoni village. The aim of
the outreach was to monitor the growth of the children under 5 years old.
Because of the long walk separating Mwazaro to Shimoni, only a few families
have the time to go to the Shimoni dispensary for monitoring. Therefore, the
community health team decided to come to Mwazaro every month.
Onsite we began to weigh all the children
and checked, knowing their age, if there were malnutrition cases, hopefully
none were identified. Each child has a “Health Care Record” indicating current
and past weights and also if the child has been immunized etc. If a
malnutrition case was identified the parent could be informed and recommended
to visit the dispensary, where the parents could receive dietary supplements
for the child such as “Plumpy nut”.
I
was registering the names, ages and weights of each child, as 2 other GVI
volunteers were weighing the children. While monitoring all the children a
local CHW (community health worker) was educating the community about different
methods of contraception.
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| Our GVI volunteer Sophie and a health worker |
All in all we weighed and recorded 67
children over a time period of about 3 hours, an average of 23 children per hour. The
day was a success with many crying babies! And to top it all off, the car broke down on
the way to pick us up so we had a sweltering, sweaty 45 minute walk on the dirt
road back to Shimoni, a tiring but productive day!
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| Weighing machine |
Paul Petges- Health volunteer
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