Baby weighing

Written Monday, 11 March 2008

For two days this past week I went around my village with my counterpart and weighed all the kids we could find five years old and younger. We're going to re-weigh the kids every month. The idea, of course, is to track malnutrition levels in the village and to help mothers keep track of how their kids are doing and to motivate them to try harder to keep their kids well nourished.

This is what I found out from the first weighing: about 25% of the kids under five years old in my village are underweight/malnourished. I was a little surprised the percentage is so high since few of the kids here look malnourished, but during the weighings I discovered that a lot of the kids who look like a fairly healthy kid of a certain age are actually a lot older. So kids who look like they're 1 ½ or 2 years old are actually 3 years old or even older. They've just stopped growing, or at least aren't growing at a normal pace. It made me really sad to realize that.

There is a fairly large difference between boys and girls – 31% of the girls were malnourished, while only 19% of the boys were. I can't figure out why this is – from my own observations and also from asking my villagers about it, I know that boys and girls are given the same food in the same amounts. It's not like all the meat and other good food goes only to the boys.

Malnutrition problems start after babies are about 6 months old, when they are weaned. They get diarrhea from drinking dirty water and crawling around in and eating dirt. I think it is really this hygiene issue that is the problem, rather than not getting enough food or vitamins. We already talk to the women about filtering and bleaching their water, but I have no idea what to do about kids crawling around in and eating dirt. It is just the environment we live in here.

One difficulty with the weighings that might have thrown off the results (and I am hoping it did and the kids aren't as malnourished as these statistics show) is that the mothers often don't know how old their kids are. Birthdays aren't celebrated here, and people, especially the uneducated, which is basically all the women, aren't very familiar with the Western calendar. So unless the women brought their kid's vaccination card with their birthday on it, usually they could only tell us something like "He was born during the last rainy season." So I am hoping that some of the kids' ages were mid-guesstimated and they are actually younger, and consequently less underweight, than we recorded.

Next month, and every month from now on, we are going to re-weigh the kids to see if they are gaining weight from one month to the next.