I'm a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad blogger. But at least the days here have been great. While it's been warming up there, it's certainly been warming up here too. HOtttt!!! But that strange mountain air that burns your face off in the sun but makes you want to cuddle up under a blanket in the shade. We're at something like 8,000 feet, so I guess it's understandable.
Things are rolling amazingly here. We're getting started on some things that I have great hopes for. Those are a secret for now, but I'll let you know when they get a-movin.
We're also using one elementary school as a pilot school for better malnutrition support in our district. So far, we've weighed and measured all the kids. With the parents of all the underweight kids, we're going to give them a series of workshops about what malnutrition is and how to avoid it. Then we're going to give each family seeds for a vegetable garden and help them plant it. At the end of the program, of course, we'll weigh the kids again and see if they've gained weight.
I'm also hoping to paint some murals and get some other stuff going in my community. This month will hopefully be our community's first Health Commission meeting. This is an initiative to help the most rural and underserved communities advocate to their needs to their municipal government. It's an amazing tool that should be implemented nationwide, but many of the rural community leaders don't even know that such commissions exist. I'm sure there will be many struggles along the way of getting this started--people in local leadership positions already donate so much time, so I'm sure this will take a while to get started and to get momentum behind it. It may not work at all, but I value this initiative tremendously and plan to put my full weight behind it. But wish me luck!
Also, I'm sure you can tell from the picture, but we just had feria in one of my aldeas and that was the parade, with community members marching dressed as family planning methods. Far too amazing. I dressed in traje for the first time (Picture below).
Everything's going really smoothly, and I can't wait to get these projects moving. I've loved having site mates and being able to collaborate with other PCVs with similar project goals. We're supposed to be getting another PCV in our community later this month once the new volunteers swear in, and I could not be more excited for the collaboration opportunities that this new volunteer will present.
We're working together with Maternal and Child Health volunteers from other communities to collect, inventory, and analyze the resources currently available for midwives' trainings and for community-based organization trainings as well. This could be a two-to-six year process---getting all the materials together, assessing what materials are needed, and creating new materials for distribution to all health centers and posts. Regardless of that, this could be one of the most worthwhile initiatives coming from the MCH project if our goal is to improve trainings given to community members with the objective of reducing maternal death. Not so glamorous a job maybe, but definitely a worthwhile one.
Sorry this is becoming less of an analysis and more of a diary. I'll get some thoughts on a page soon and share them with you all!!
Things are rolling amazingly here. We're getting started on some things that I have great hopes for. Those are a secret for now, but I'll let you know when they get a-movin.
We're also using one elementary school as a pilot school for better malnutrition support in our district. So far, we've weighed and measured all the kids. With the parents of all the underweight kids, we're going to give them a series of workshops about what malnutrition is and how to avoid it. Then we're going to give each family seeds for a vegetable garden and help them plant it. At the end of the program, of course, we'll weigh the kids again and see if they've gained weight.
I'm also hoping to paint some murals and get some other stuff going in my community. This month will hopefully be our community's first Health Commission meeting. This is an initiative to help the most rural and underserved communities advocate to their needs to their municipal government. It's an amazing tool that should be implemented nationwide, but many of the rural community leaders don't even know that such commissions exist. I'm sure there will be many struggles along the way of getting this started--people in local leadership positions already donate so much time, so I'm sure this will take a while to get started and to get momentum behind it. It may not work at all, but I value this initiative tremendously and plan to put my full weight behind it. But wish me luck!
Also, I'm sure you can tell from the picture, but we just had feria in one of my aldeas and that was the parade, with community members marching dressed as family planning methods. Far too amazing. I dressed in traje for the first time (Picture below).
Everything's going really smoothly, and I can't wait to get these projects moving. I've loved having site mates and being able to collaborate with other PCVs with similar project goals. We're supposed to be getting another PCV in our community later this month once the new volunteers swear in, and I could not be more excited for the collaboration opportunities that this new volunteer will present.
We're working together with Maternal and Child Health volunteers from other communities to collect, inventory, and analyze the resources currently available for midwives' trainings and for community-based organization trainings as well. This could be a two-to-six year process---getting all the materials together, assessing what materials are needed, and creating new materials for distribution to all health centers and posts. Regardless of that, this could be one of the most worthwhile initiatives coming from the MCH project if our goal is to improve trainings given to community members with the objective of reducing maternal death. Not so glamorous a job maybe, but definitely a worthwhile one.
Sorry this is becoming less of an analysis and more of a diary. I'll get some thoughts on a page soon and share them with you all!!
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