HIV/AIDS in Malawi Continued…

So, in my last update, I talked about transmissions of HIV/AIDS in Malawi. This time, I want to talk about this program I’ve been conducting with my Malawian counterpart, a healthworker from my health center (he’s named after Davie Jones! Haha)

Anyway, we decided that we wanted to present the Hope Kit to 10 villages within and around our catchment area. The Hope Kit consisted of fun activities that explain how HIV spreads, how it works in the body, why people with HIV should not be stigmatized, etc. There were many visual and physical demonstrations and we chose the ones that were most fitting for the villages. We targeted 10 villages with risk factors of cultural practices that contribute to HIV transmission and/or low school attendance. We spoke to the chiefs first and invited the youth clubs, the Village AIDS Committees, and a parent from each household to attend the event.

Little did I know what we signed up for.

There are moments when you think, “This is what Peace Corps is all about.” I had quite a few of those Peace Corps moments because of this program. I should’ve known that there were reasons that these villages were at risk, meaning I had to trudge through muddy roads, rain, rivers, and jungles to get to these places. We visited one village where we tried to take the short path with our bicycles but the path wasn’t meant for cycling. (It turned out that the longer path was actually faster with our bicycles too.) I kept running into the maize stalks on my bike, and I fell a couple times, especially when going down some rocks. Then we went up, up, up the hill, then down the hill, then up again, then down, then up… Then there were the rivers. Two of them. O.K., they were more like streams, but being the klutz I am, I couldn’t avoid slipping into the water. And that wasn’t my first time. I slipped in another stream going to another village. You’d think the adventure ended there, but actually… we had to cross another stream to get to our next destination. But there were no stepping stones this time. Since my socks and shoes were already wet, I was ready to walk through the stream, but the chief wouldn’t allow me, so he picked me up and carried me across! Oh man, by the end of the day, I really had to laugh because I wasn’t expecting any of it.

I don’t regret any of it, though. These villages were remote and isolated, so they were probably neglected by a lot of their community workers and NGOs. Some villages were not even assisted by NGOs, so I knew they gained much from our presentation. My initial thoughts about the presentation were that it was too juvenile and seemed somewhat repetitive to a group of people who already knew about HIV/AIDS. But my Malawian counterpart explained to me how they were actually beneficial. Our first activity, “Fleet of Hope”, involved using pictures of people (father, mother, schoolgirl, witch doctor, etc.) to tell stories in which they are “sitting” in one of the boats of the ABC - Abstinence, Being Faithful, Condoms – or in the water with HIV. He told me that this activity allowed people to share messages with their spouses and communities without having to confront them since Malawians are non-confrontational: “This man is a farmer and has a wife. When he comes home from the gardens, he is faithful to his wife so they don’t have to use condoms and can avoid HIV transmission.” I was somewhat amused by one man’s “This man isn’t abstaining or being faithful but he uses condoms every time!” Our last activity, “HIV in the body”, uses people to represent the white blood cell, HIV, opportunistic infections, ARV, and the ABC, and mobilizes them to show how each functions in or around the body. This was perhaps the most educational activity, as most people are uneducated and have never fully understood the works of HIV and ARVs. But I think the most satisfying part for me is the Q&A. I’m amazed at the kind of myths and misunderstandings people have, and the Q&A is the opportune moment to debunk them. (I don’t want people to think that I’ve been doing all the work; I want to credit my counterpart for doing all of the work in Chichewa. I just sit there and look pretty! haha)

Malawians are fond of meetings, but I know that this was a special kind of meeting they’ve never attended before. All the meetings I’ve attended in Malawi have been - for lack of better words - boring. People really like to hear themselves talk, so they can talk for hours on end without ever making a point. So I was not surprised to find some villagers sulking (and even looking unhappy!) when we first appeared. But by the end of each and every presentation, despite sitting for 2-3 hours, the villagers were laughing and singing. The smiles beaming from their faces and their inquiries about our next visit are all the thanks I need. These are the moments when I think, “This is what Peace Corps is all about.”

Until the next Peace Corps moment,
Elaine aka “Ellen”

My Malawian counterpart and a villager sharing a story during "Fleet of Hope"

They're "greeting" (which symbolizes sexual transmission) in "Wildfire"

A woman trying to figure out if this man has HIV/AIDS or not

As for my cat...

I decided to name her "Wosaka" as in "Hunter". :)

She still has to learn to not poop and pee under my bed though...

and to live up to her name... HUNT down those rats and eat them!

It’s a vulture! It’s a toucan! It’s a…

vul-can with a mohawk?

I’m not talking about the Star Trek best known for “Beam me up, Scotty!”.

At first I thought the bird was a vulture because it was huge in size and had a neck that arched like a vulture’s. But the second time I saw it, I thought it was a toucan because it had a huge beak shaped like a toucan’s. But then I looked again closely the third time and it turned out the “beak” was actually a mohawk. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s a huge bird with a mohawk. And I don’t know if he was trying to be funny, but a man said that its name was “Abambobobo”. (“Abambo” means “man” or “father”.) I tried to take a picture of it when it was in my backyard, but it didn’t come out well.

Something I do want to take a good picture of, though, are the baboons. I heard there are baboons in the trees around my area (though not near my house because I don’t have trees big enough to fit them), so I told my agogo (“grandmother”) that she would have to show me one day because I’d like to take pictures! I also heard there are alligators/crocodiles (same thing!) around my area too that wander from the river to eat the chickens! And hyenas are supposedly around looking for carcasses to feast on but I have yet to see them.

None of the baboons or alliga-codiles have made an appearance in or around my house, though I’ve seen a good number of other critters. There was an ugly toad in my house that wouldn’t leave even after I chased it out with a broom. I think it wants my cat to kiss it so it can turn into a prince, because it seems to keep coming back to her water can. (All she does is meow and drink next to it. I thought cats were supposed to torture anything that’s alive and moves!) Then, there are the lizards. What can I say? They like to eat the flies and poop anywhere they please. And last but not least, the cockroaches – the reason I don’t urinate for 12 hours straight. Well, I’m pleased to announce that they’ve been annihilated! I actually mixed water with the drug that we use to treat our mosquito nets and dumped it into my “toilet”. Next thing I knew there was a diaspora of cockroaches all over my backyard! When they kept trying to come into my house, I freaked out and ran to get my agogo. By the time I came back, they were either plopped over dead or eaten by the chickens (surely they had diarrhea after their meals). But now they’re gone! I still don’t use the toilet that much at night though because of other critters, like snakes, scorpions (one bit my medical in-charge), and… well, you get the point.

Anyway, there’s a lot I want to share because I’ve been thinking a lot about… a lot. Education, HIV, gender equality, famine, genocide, prostitution, rape, witchcraft… which I can’t possibly go into all at once, so I’ll start with HIV/AIDS. I know I mentioned it briefly in some of my updates, but I wanted to go into a little more details so that hopefully you'll get a better understanding of the plight that Malawians face.

According to National AIDS Commission of Malawi, 790,000 of HIV-positive clients are 15-49 year olds, roughly 14% of the total population, and 440,000 (12%) are 14 years old and younger (the high rate’s mostly from mother-to-child-transmission). 58% of adults infected are women. About 80,000 die every year due to opportunistic infections caused by AIDS. 46% of orphans are orphaned by AIDS. The number one death of HIV clients is TB, and the number of TB cases have tripled since 1990 because of HIV/AIDS. As of 2003, my district had a confirmed number of 18,000 people infected. You can go to http://www.aidsnac.malawi.net/ for more statistics and information.

Sex is the main mode of HIV transmission in Africa, especially Malawi. Unfortunately, many of Malawi’s cultural practices involve in sexual intercourse, such as:
-Chokolo is “wife inheritance”, which is commonly practiced in Islam (a few girls were telling me that Muslim women were not allowed to refuse men when they wanted them to be their girlfriends or wives)
-Kulowa kufa is “death cleansing”, which involves hiring a man to have sex with a widow the night of her husband’s death to “cleanse” her of grief
-Chinamwali is the initiation rite for boys, which involves women (usually sex workers) for them to have sex with (the idea is that they have to be “experienced” as adults)
-Fisi is “hyena”, which is an initiation rite for girls where “fisi” is hired to have sex with the girls to remove the “dust” from her body or else they would have “unsmooth” skin
-Hlazi is the giving of a man’s sister-in-law to his brother to thank him for caring for his wife properly
-“Entering oven” happens in the more rural areas where they believe that to bake bricks well, the bakers should sleep with young girls the night they’re baking bricks
-Tattoos done by witch doctors by use of razor blades (this one’s not sexually transmission but it’s common enough to be discussed)

And there are proverbs that even encourage people to indulge in sex while they’re young, such as Mkazi sachepa (“The girl is always ripe enough”) and Okaona nyanja anaona ndi mvuu zomwe (“When one visits the lake, he/she also visits the hippos”).

The good news, however, is that since Malawi recognized HIV/AIDS in their country in 1985 and the current president allowed international aid agencies to return in recent years, there has been a good amount of education and awareness about the cultural practices that contribute to HIV transmission. The most common one that’s still practiced in my catchment area is the initiation rite. Despite their awareness of how HIV can spread, some parents still believe some of the cultural myths and that they must “preserve” their culture by forcing their children to participate in the initiation rites despite their protests.

But there’s still much to be done. Now that they know how their cultural practices can transmit HIV/AIDS, there’s still a need to learn about other modes of transmissions. Apparently there are still myths and rumors going around, such as:
-Mosquitoes can transmit HIV because they suck people’s blood and insert them into other people.
-Condoms can cause cancer. (This might’ve been triggered by the onset of cancer cases when spermicide was introduced. It’s now banned.)
-A person can get HIV when a witch “magically” has sex with someone without his/her knowledge. (This one’s complicated.)
-The barber can transmit HIV because he uses the same clipper or razor to shave people’s hair. (There’s not enough blood to be transmitted through it.)
-Peanut butter is a medicine for HIV like ARVs. (It has been used as a nutrition supplement but does not directly repress HIV.)

And there are still more myths that I’m learning about on a continual basis. I know I’ve typed a lot of information here and I don’t want to overwhelm you, so I’ll save my update about the HIV/AIDS awareness outreach for next time.

Here's a picture to entertain you:

Think it's a normal ball? Usually it'd be made of plastic bags. But when I visited a village and we inquired about the contents within it, we learned that there were condoms within the ball. Ohhhh so THAT's where all the condoms are going! (But I was also kinda disturbed where the little kids got the condoms from.)

And one last thing – I’ll be traveling to Hong Kong and touring to Egypt in May! J The thought of Chinese food, Starbucks’ caramel frappuccinos, McDonald’s apple pies and yogurt parfaits, udons and chow mein and vermicelli and NOODLES (and a good number of other items I’ve requested from America) excite me like never before! Oh, that and seeing my family of course!

P.S. I don’t know if I’ve sent my recent address out because I’ve been losing a lot of mail through the previous address, so here it is:
PO Box 74
Chilembwe, Malawi
Central Africa

And for those who inquired about calling, you can go to http://www.callingcardoutlet.com/ and get a $20 phone card for 5 hours I think. And my number’s 001-265-947-67-54.

My unnamed cat and unwanted NGOs

I am now the proud mother of “Hey you” (or more like “Hey Kitty”)!

I received a new child amonth ago,but after twenty minutes, she (or is it he?) ran away after I left her with my friend. I thought all hope was lost because she didn’t come back (maybe she ran the whole 8 km home?), but the next morning, I woke up and heard a small meowlng. Lo and behold! There was my cat! Little did I know what was coming. Who knew parenting would be so hard? She wouldn’t stop crying (meowing) and I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a baby (cat). I still don’t. I also didn’t know cats were so clingy! (Or maybe it’s just this one.) Or how difficult it is to potty-train! She keeps defecating in all the wrong places – even though the litter box sits there quite unused. After having this cat, I think I’ve given up on parenthood altogether.

“Hey you” slowly evolved into “Cleopatra” (don’t ask me how I came up with that name; I just did). Or “Cleo” if she is actually a he. But after talking to my brother who so kindly said, “After 3 weeks, that was the best you can name her?!”, I decided to resort to “Hey Kitty” again. (Hey, I wasn’t the one who named our white rabbit “Butterscotch”! I really wanted “Snow White”. Love you Eric! J) Then, he told me about a person named “Bacon” - “Here Bacon, have some fish!”… Nah. I actually wanted to name her “Nala”, you know, like from Lion King, because she looks so cute and adorable – just like Nala! J Of course my brother had to go and ruin it with “But EVERY cat looks like Nala!” So he suggested an African name – “What does ‘Nala’ mean in Chichewa?” Well… “ng’ala” (you gotta roll the tongue a bit there, like nnnnny) means “eye cataract” in Chichewa. No way. O.K., I guess I’ll try to find out what “Mighty Rat Killer” in Chichewa is even though it would be an 18-syllable name.

This bewildering experience with my cat has epitomized my wondering and confusion of “Exactly what am I doing here in Malawi?” It seems everything in my life has been put on hold – pause­ – that I’m really starting to wonder if I will accomplish anything. Time goes backward. Actually, time’s not a concept here. (When you mention time, they’ll point at the sky – that’s noon.) It’s like… Let’s…wait… how… about…tomorrow….. next week..… next month… actually……. Maaaayyyyyybeeeee neeeeeeeext year? Oh, you mean, like after I leave Malawi? I got pretty frustrated because a lot of my plans kept being postponed always because of some unknown scheduled events. I’ve gotten accustomed to hearing my supervisor respond to my scheduling inquiries with “no known activities yet”.

And sometimes I wonder if it’s really at all possible to introduce anything sustainable in Malawi. The whole Peace Corps jargon of “capacity building”, “technical assistance”, “sustainability” seems to be empty words to Malawians. What I hear is, “Where’s the money?”, “Why can’t you just give us money?”, “Give me money!”

They’ve convinced me. Money is the answer for everything.

How sad but true. How is it that I escaped from the materialism and greed of America only to find the very same tribulations in Malawi? I hate that. I hate that money is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and all they can think about is $$$ka-ching$$$money$$$kwachas.

I know as an American citizen, I’ll never (knock on wood) understand poverty (mostly thanks to welfare) and experience the effects of poverty – hunger, lack of basic needs and resources, inability to provide for health care, etc. – but is money really more important than knowledge, education, faith?

I know that as a 24-year-old volunteer with no masters or PhD, I’m oblivious to numerous factors that contribute to this beggar phenomenon in Malawi. I think the best thing to do now is to major in sociology, anthropology, economics, business, political science, development studies, and maybe even international studies, then maybe I’ll actually begin to understand. Maybe. But there are a few things that I do know:

There’s a dichotomy between foreign aid actually assisting the poor and actually creating helplessness (and laziness for others). NGOs come into Malawi (and other third-world countries as well) thinking that they know what’s best which actually ends up harming them more than they do good. And that’s just to give them a butt-load amount of money so that they can keep begging and asking for more money instead of learning how to work for it. How about teaching them new knowledge and skills? Giving them resources? Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that NGOs are not doing any of that because they definitely are doing a lot to help the Malawians, especially in stemming the tide of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

But when I wanted to teach my fellow health workers about nutrition and counseling mothers with malnourished children with food preparation skills, their first question was, “Will there be an allowance?” I didn’t know what to say, because I knew the first words out of my mouth would have been more than a mouthful. But thankfully, my Malawian counterpart intervened to explain that as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I only get “just enough [allowance] to survive” and that my role here is solely to provide “technical assistance” and not money. And I was appeased a bit when the supervisor of the health workers told them that the knowledge from the training in itself should be beneficial, and that as health workers, they should be trying to help these children – not just caring about how to gain money. But how funny that after I told them “no allowance”, they seemed to have lost all interest in my training.

What’s truly disturbing me is also how their beggar mentality can actually create more harm than thought possible. The previous volunteer before me had tried to implement a nutrition program in one of the villages teaching them how to use their locally available food in their homes and gardens to nourish their children properly. But it was a complete failure (the mothers failed to properly nourish their children). Why? Because they said, why can’t you just give us the food and money? Since they were used to an NGO giving them money and supplying them every time, they refused to learn this incredibly useful and sustainable skill that could nourish their children and make them healthy beings!

And I think the problem is just this: NGOs are so filthy rich that sometimes they seem to make rash decisions or plans that are not beneficial to the recipients. In a passing conversation with an employee from a NGO, I discovered that though it puts a lot of its donors’ money to good use, thousands of dollars were “lost” and not accounted for. That’s just how filthy rich they are.

And so they decide to create a divergence in the economics of Malawi by making all things (and jobs) foreign great and all things Malawian poor. For example: a ground worker (gardener) who works for an NGO makes almost 50% more money than a secondary school principal would. A counselor working for an NGO can have a starting salary of MK45,000 while the very same position in a government hospital provides a starting salary of MK7,000.

Hmm.

Well, gee, no wonder everyone wants to work for an NGO. So you can forget about working for the government of Malawi.

Sometimes, I just don’t get it. Why can’t NGOs match the needs of the economy rather than increase the standards that Malawi cannot match? One way would be to working hand-in-hand with the government to improve the salaries and knowledge of the health workers rather than developing their own work anomalies. I guess one way that can somewhat depict what I mean is this: a health worker attending a training workshop (i.e., home-based care, Village AIDS Committee, etc.) would receive MK2,000 in one day, whereas they receive MK5,000 salary in one month. Is it just me or is there something seriously wrong with that? No wonder the health workers wanted an allowance from my training workshop. So, now every worker’s goal is to attend these workshops so that at the end of the day, they can collect their 2 weeks’ “salary”. So much for encouraging them to gain this knowledge so they can be more efficient workers, which I’ve found doesn’t happen. At all. They don’t work. O.K., that may be an overstatement, because I admit there are a few who work hard and I do admire them because they take on so much baggage for other people. BUT out of the 19 health workers at my site, I’d say that only 6 of them actually work hard and only one of them is female.

I’m so frustrated by this whole experience. I can’t even begin to describe adequately what I’m seeing with my very own eyes the detrimental effects I’ve seen that some NGOs have on the villages. But of course nothing is ever plain black and white. I have to actually consider – do their benefits actually outweigh the costs? I mean, they really are producing a lot of benefits and improvements in ARV treatment for HIV/AIDS, development of HIV/AIDS education programs, etc. But should they really do it at the cost of hurting their economy and creating unsustainable development programs while creating a dependency on external assistance? So you can see what I have to constantly battle in my own mind. I have much I want to say about this paradigm, especially regarding how we can address these problems by changing the infrastructure of the NGOs’ approaches through monitoring and evaluating and accountability. Perhaps I will save it for next time… or maybe for a thesis paper.

So I thought I’d end this overbearing long update with an exciting news: I’m adopting Madonna’s niece!! Just kidding. I’m not adopting a kid anytime soon – especially not after having this “kitty/bacon/nala/eyecataracts/mightyratkiller”. But it sounds like my family might come to visit Africa (albeit not Malawi) in April or May! If this plan really goes through, it sounds like they’ll probably be my only visitors during my stint in Malawi! :)

P.S. K-Ci and Jojo are coming to Malawi! What in the world?! Oh the good ol' days...

Nkhata Bay

... was where I went for New Year's with other volunteers. I'm using someone else's camera but unfortunately a lot of the pictures were deleted... like us holding a fish. :(

But Nkhata Bay (Lake Malawi) is so gorgeous. It made me realize how much I miss the water (Pacific Ocean).

So, after Christmas, we hitched a ride up to Mzuzu, the nothern major city (there are only 3 major cities in Malawi - in the south, central, north) and stayed there for 3 days. We locked ourselves in the Peace Corps rest house, ate pot roast/brownies/bread pudding/good food!, and watched Apocalypto, Knocked Up, Freaks and Geeks, Peanuts Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and others (that's how deprived we are).


Then, on New Year's Eve, we rode down to the lake and camped out on the beach the whole day and night. It was so peaceful sleeping on the beach (though painful for my back) listening to the rain pitter-patter on the tent and the waves crashing. We somehow got fireworks too, so we were setting them off 2 feet from our tarp shelter. o_O But I love fireworks so that was pretty awesome! :)


Here are some more pictures of Mua Mission:

The church

A cool statue

Scary looking thing

Traditional Chingoni, one of the tribes in Malawi

Welcome to my humble abode

Here are pictures of my house. I have a lot of stuff (i.e. furnitures) and nowhere to put my stuff, so yeah... Also, all the furnitures, buckets, utensils, plates, and stuff were accumulated from previous volunteers, so I didn't have to buy anything. But they did take up room. So we'll start with entering my house!

You can see straight into my backyard. That's my bike hanging by the wall with a map of the world on my wall. My bedroom is just to the right. Shifting to the left a little...

I have 4 chairs in the house... I use 2 for sitting... 1 for stuff... and 1 for cooking...

I don't know if you can see my cooker... but it's on the chair because...


I don't have a counter to cook on (they had taken out the slab for some reason and the lower slab is too low because my cooker's cord is not long enough). I've been still waiting for the mission to make the slab since August... I store my produce in those clay pots on the ground... to keep out the rats!

For some reason, someone decided to make a huge shelf and place it in the kitchen. So, I put all my utensils and stuff on the shelves. Then, you can walk out into my backyard.


The door on the left is for the kitchen... Most people cook with fire in their outdoor kitchen, but I don't use it. The drape on the left is the "door" for the "toilet". And then you can't see it, but you can turn left from the "toilet" into my "bafa" room. When you look right...

you'll see a lot of shrubbery. haha Those are banana trees and a papaya tree. I also have a refuse/compost pit that's covered by green. haha

I didn't take pictures of my bedroom or garden, so I'll save those for next time! And yes, I do have a garden! Sweet potatoes, corn, peanuts, soya beans, Chinese cabbage, bok choys, lettuce... and WATERMELONS! I'm hoping the pests won't eat my food. I'll be really happy if my watermelons succeed. I've only had one watermelon the whole time I was here. :(


And as usual, I end with pictures of cute kids. They were in my last post too. haha They're just so cute! :)

The Death Season

I didn’t think it really existed until now. People talked about the rainy season, dry season, harvesting season, sowing season, even the rat season (which I’ve become all too familiar with), and then there’s the death season. And it’s strange to think how it’s just a natural part of the life cycle and how well people react to it.

I attended my first funeral in Malawi just last week. It was the child of my youth club’s treasurer. He was only 2 years old. And it was so surreal to think that I had touched the child one day and even prayed for him. 24 hours later, he was dead. The funeral was somber as any other funeral would be. The most heart-breaking part was seeing and hearing my friend cry, “My child! My child!” (I had to really refrain from crying with him for fear of bringing attention upon myself.) I saw him 48 hours later laughing as he always was, though I could see the sadness in his eyes. He couldn’t even bear to look while I picked up a 2-year-old child. How do you comfort someone after he lost his only child? How do you make him laugh knowing that there’s an emptiness within him?

My youth club’s secretary lost his father to a car accident and his uncle to some illness all within two weeks.

This death season is unfortunately caused by the breeding of mosquitoes that come with the rainy season. Sadly, it’s the number one (and easily preventable) killer for under-five children. At our health center, there were only 52 cases of under-five children with malaria in October (pre-rainy season), and within just 3 weeks in January, there were 209 cases of under-five children with malaria – the aforementioned child being one of them. My friend told me that the child was given 4 types of medication, none of which worked. I guess it was too late, and he passed. When you’ve entered the advanced stage of malaria, you start to convulse uncontrollably, which can result in brain damage if not treated ahead of time.

If you’re worried about me, you shouldn’t – I’m taking my anti-malarial pills weekly (though they come with nightmares, nausea, hallucinations, among other things). I probably had, have, or will have malaria, but the medicine is already in my house if I ever need it, and my anti-malaria pills are doing their duties to repressing the poison from being inserted into my blood.

But what about the other people who can’t afford to go to a private health clinic? Or to buy medication? What if the hospitals run out of medication? (Thank God for the U.S. Presidential Malaria Initiative, because they have distributed free medication to all health centers – public or private – for at least three months.) I can see the fear in people’s eyes, as people are frantically asking me and the health workers for mosquito nets. We had just done an assessment of the 92 villages in my catchment area (total population of about 39,000) and discovered that only 25% of children under five are using mosquito nets. So that puts the 75% of children at an increased risk of contracting malaria, which without being treated, can result in death. Currently, they’re only given out to antenatal mothers and new-born infants receiving their BCG immunizations, or with money, they can be bought in town. Previously, they were given out to all under-five children and were even sold in the villages for really cheap, but they were stopped for various reasons – one of which being that fishermen were using them as fishing nets. But now I’m frustrated and can understand the mothers’ fears. If malaria can easily be prevented by simply sleeping in a mosquito net (mosquitoes attack viciously at night), then why not just distribute them? There are times when I feel so helpless when I know that simple solutions are readily available to address an issue – and this is one of those times.

But on a lighter note (are my entries always this depressing? Sorry!), an aspect that I’ve been working hard on is addressing malnutrition. Since this is the sowing season, that means there isn’t any food in the fields, so a lot of children are malnourished. I was becoming so concerned when I saw them coming and leaving without anything being done. The World Food Program (in partnership with UNICEF or Action Against Hunger or some other NGO) used to provide supplementary food but they have withdrawn that program to only be used for those who are admitted to the nutrition rehabilitation unit or out patient department (usually the severely malnourished ones). So, now children come, are weighed, and leave without any record or monitoring of the underweight children. The most frustrating part for me was watching the health workers record their weights and not say a thing to them. I had to inquire about it a few times, but when I realized that they either didn’t care enough or didn’t know what to say or do, I had to take it upon myself to do something.

I’ve currently started a book to diagnose and monitor the underweight children’s weight and nutrition statuses. I’m also recruiting about half of the health workers with good counseling skills, so I can train them about nutrition, counseling, and food preparation. But because the mothers can only come for a short period of time and contact with the mothers is infrequent, I wanted to make the program as effective as possible in the short amount of time given. I’ve discovered that most people like to lecture and listen to themselves talk, so I realized that counseling is an important skill in order to make an education effective. At the same time, interactive activities benefit the mothers by allowing them to learn for themselves.

However, 20 minutes would not suffice for mothers to learn behavior change. So, another program I’m interested in implementing is the Positive Deviance Hearth. The main idea behind it is using mothers with healthy children as role models for mothers with malnourished children. After assessing the “positive deviance” behaviors that mothers use and the local resources they use, the 12-day program is implemented through the mothers sharing their knowledge and skills while learning that they can use what they already have to nourish their children. People often think that you have to feed them soda and other junk food in order to nourish their children (what do you think causes obesity in America?), and so they often resort into the “Woe is me, because I don’t have money” mentality. It’s amazing how a little education about nutrition can change one’s perspective. (I also realized how little I knew about nutrition before coming here; that was how much I took it for granted or how little I cared for it. Fortunately, my mother always prepared healthy food and subsequently taught me.)

I’m hoping that the monitoring book I’ve developed will help me to pinpoint the villages with higher malnutrition rates, as well as the types of illnesses or other causes that are major contributing factors to malnutrition. From there on, I hope to develop a malnutrition clinic once a month (already in place at other health centers) or another nutrition program.

But on an even lighter (and more amusing I promise!) note… about the Rat Season. I guess a certain little rat decided it would make his little home underneath my bed before I had moved into the house. I was hemming and hawing about getting a cat or using a trap (because I would have to inevitably touch the rat!), but I figured it was more cumbersome to lock up all my food away, stare angrily at my chewed-up plastic bottles, clean up after its droppings, and listen to the scrapings. Last month, I (as well as a few others) even saw the rat (or was it a mouse?) run around my house! I thought enough is enough! So, I asked my trustworthy agogo (“grandmother”) to set a trap and kill it while I was gone for New Year’s. I came home; the rat was dead! Hallelujah!! She said it was fat. Why wouldn’t it be? It was chewing up my plastics! Then, she served it to the crows. Serves it right for invading my home! (Sorry, I’m not usually that cruel. haha)

Yes, I know that “Ratatouille” came out recently. My mom kept telling me that I should watch it; my brother told me she watched it twice and demanded him to send me a copy of the movie. I thought, why?! I hate rats! So you may find it amusing to read about my rat problems and hear about how awesome and amazing Remy – a rat – is. I watched it and I had to laugh; I don’t think my rat was planning on becoming a world famous chef. But I think some other chefs may have been planning on using him, though. (My neighbor wanted to eat him, but the wife refused.) There was a bonus feature about rats’ rights and I had to think, wow. I almost wanted to start justifying that they didn’t have rights! According to Remy (the main character) or was it Emile?, all the rats wanted were “garbage to eat”. And I thought, well, Malawi is so poor; there’s no food to eat, much less garbage to spare; and I don’t want to risk being bitten by a rat (several people have told me about rats being so hungry that they’ve bitten people’s feet in the villages). O.K., maybe I’m taking the movie too seriously! haha But seriously, though, I couldn’t stand having it in my house any longer. So, I’m rejoicing that my house is now rat-free (for awhile at least)! I’m still waiting to get a cat, but I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get a kitten. If it’s that difficult, I might end up getting a ferret, because better yet, they eat rats. But I heard they’re naughty and sly. We’ll see. :)