Written Monday, 21 July 2008
After I got back from Tamba last time I started bugging my counterpart that we needed to do some more health activities – baby weighings or health classes. Since it is the rainy/farming season, people don't have much free time, so we decided to forgo the baby weighings for now since they take all day, and instead do some health classes, which only take about an hour.
So after some discussion, we decided to do the classes on nutrition, and also a baby porridge demonstration, which I did once last year. I knew that the women wouldn't start making the baby porridge after I taught it to them, even though it only requires fairly cheap, easily available ingredients; we included the porridge demonstration mainly as a bribe, to get the women to come to the class – because when the demonstration is done, the women can feed the porridge we made to their babies. Also I knew that if I did a class about nutrition, telling the women they need to feed their kids a balanced diet, that they would tell me that I should be giving them the money to buy such things (even though they can fill the protein and vitamin categories with peanuts and baobab and other leaves that are readily available).
So I bought them off with the porridge demonstration, and the class went great. They even asked me when I'm going to do another baby weighing, which made me really happy.
I'm going to do the same class again tomorrow for a different group of women. Hopefully it will go just as well.
After I got back from Tamba last time I started bugging my counterpart that we needed to do some more health activities – baby weighings or health classes. Since it is the rainy/farming season, people don't have much free time, so we decided to forgo the baby weighings for now since they take all day, and instead do some health classes, which only take about an hour.
So after some discussion, we decided to do the classes on nutrition, and also a baby porridge demonstration, which I did once last year. I knew that the women wouldn't start making the baby porridge after I taught it to them, even though it only requires fairly cheap, easily available ingredients; we included the porridge demonstration mainly as a bribe, to get the women to come to the class – because when the demonstration is done, the women can feed the porridge we made to their babies. Also I knew that if I did a class about nutrition, telling the women they need to feed their kids a balanced diet, that they would tell me that I should be giving them the money to buy such things (even though they can fill the protein and vitamin categories with peanuts and baobab and other leaves that are readily available).
So I bought them off with the porridge demonstration, and the class went great. They even asked me when I'm going to do another baby weighing, which made me really happy.
I'm going to do the same class again tomorrow for a different group of women. Hopefully it will go just as well.
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