La Santé Avant Tout

It’s been a year and change in village thus far. My first year was filled with many cool projects, big and small. However, they were mainly concerning my primary sector, community economic development. Sure I’ve done some health trainings here and there, but they were small in nature.

Recently, simply due to the luck of good timing, my village and I were able to undertake two solid health projects in Ramsa. The first was a two week enriched porridge training with 9 women with malnourished children. The second is a community-based largescale malaria project which will carry through until the month of November. I brought these two project ideas to my community, but it was been them (especially my Health Clinic’s Head Nurse and one of our Community Health Agents) to have taken the ideas and turned them into reality.

The porridge project, which in French we call “Le FARN”, or “Foyer de l’apprentissage et réhabilitation nutritionnelle”, is an intensive two week project with the goal of getting malnourished children to gain weight. Each day we would first do a mini training on an important health topic (such as nutrition, hygiene, family planning, or malaria). We did this because to properly raise a child, one needs to do much more than provide good food. Afterwards would train them on a new porridge recipe, using only local ingredients to ensure that they could actually practice these recipes at home. All of the materials were paid for by the participants, and this aspect was crucially important to me. In Burkina, there are a lot of free handouts coming from outside donors. One example is free grain powder/nutrition bars for malnourished children. In theory, these gifts should rehabilitate the children in a certain amount of time. But, most times it is consumed by other members of the family. Having the participants in this project pay for the ingredients and other materials was a way to start training them on being accountable. The lesson that they could effectively nourish their children using their own resources and not relying on outside gifts was probably the most important take-away of this project. Again, I was there in a facilitating/organizing/supporting role while my counterpart led most of the trainings and saw the project to its end.

We take the baby's weight on the first and twelfth days to monitor their weight gain (or loss). 

Mixing in other health trainings as well. Here my counterpart and I are informing them on the three food groups. Images are key.

Voici the porridge. The women had no issue cooking. Equally as awesome, everybody shared the work and didn't complain.

Training on family planning. 

End result: baby happy with full stomach, mother happy because baby is happy.

In the end, nearly half of the babies gained a good amount of weight. The rest were neutral, but if they continue with the porridge at their homes they will surely see positive results in the coming months.

During the second week of our porridge project, we started another endeavor in the health arena. The PECADOM+ Malaria project was started years ago in Senegal and has proved to be an effective way to combat malaria in the village setting. The present situation in village is that malaria is very normalized to all villagers (kind of like the common cold back in the US), resulting in many people simply living as a malaria host without seeking treatment. This enables malaria to be easily transmitted within family compounds with its proliferation never-ending. In this project, community health agents will do weekly sweeps in each neighborhood and give a free malaria test to anyone showing symptoms. They will then be able to buy medicine right then and there if tested positive.

My Health Clinic's Head Nurse (bottom right) training our health workers on how to administer the malaria "Rapid Diagnostic Tests". 

Our first day in the field. For the tests we have to draw a bit of blood. The little kids either react one of two ways: they do absolutely nothing or they throw a massive tantrum. 

She was tested positive :(

Last month we did our first test-run, to give it a try and see what difficulties would come. The first couple of days were a bit rough but by the end each team had their process down and could do up to 50-60 tests in one 2-3 hour sitting. The results from this test-run were staggering. Almost in each neighborhood around half of the people that were tested were positive with malaria. One night 39/67 were positive, mostly children. This is shocking for me because it is currently the hottest period of the year when malaria is supposed to be at its calmest. I’m apprehensive now to see the data when we start this project when the rains come (which is the worst time of the year for malaria). The silver lining of our test run was that each worker saw the importance of their contribution to the community and is ready to carry this project though during the rainy season, despite having to farm all day before setting-out into the village for their sweeps.

In other news, my counterpart Hermane and I were able to execute a successful Animal Husbandry training exchange at my friend’s village in another region of Burkina. It took us all day long to travel 100km. We were tired and anxious, wanting everything to go perfectly. And it did. Hermane did a professional-style training and the participants were engaged each day from 8-5, despite the blistering heat. This training was very heartwarming for me, since I know that at least with my counterpart in my village our work will continue on because of his hard work ethic and tremendous capabilities.

Starting off our first day talking about chicken coups.

A true Burkinabe Change Agent. Helping his country by using his gift of effectively sharing knowledge. 

All the participants except my fellow volunteer, who is taking the picture.  

Rainy season starts in a month, but not before the single hottest month of the year. Hopefully I can make it through.

Until next time,

MB