I was not a huge kid person before I left America, frankly I found most of them to be whiny and obnoxious, thus I thought the majority of my work here would revolve around adults. However, almost by accident, a very happy accident, most of my work here has revolved around children, and thus by consequence, with mothers. I have learned how important a mother is to a child's life, and how dire the consequences can be without one.
Recently a grandmother showed up to my door cradling the tiniest 6 week old baby I had ever seen. The child'd mother had died when she was just 2 weeks old, thus taking away the child's best chance for survival and health, breast milk. The family had no money and no way to continue to pay for formula. In conjunction with my clinic, we are making sure that this baby has formula and is well taken care of. Her grandmother carries around two bags, one will the baby's feeding cup (the dirt of the village set up makes using a bottle unhygienic even dangerous) formula and boiled/slightly cooled water, in the other bag she carries extra diapers and baby powder. Though she has children of her own, her youngest is 9, she has now devoted her existence to making sure this child is fed, bathed, and loved. In lieu of a swing, she rocks the baby by hand until she sleeps, and is excited to see that the child is not only alive, but growing! Last week, the baby, Veronica, was smiling and holding my hand, a positive sign in her development. While it is going to take a village to make sure this child survives past 6 months, the smile on Veronica's face makes it all worth it.
The worst part of this story is that it didn't have to be this way. Her mother gave birth at home, as so many village women do, and for whatever reason died 2 weeks later. She was unconscious when she arrived at the clinic, so she could have died from anything ranging from malnutrition, malaria, or complications from child birth, no body knows. The one thing that is certain is that her death was most likely preventable. If she had just given birth at the clinic she would have been in the care of trained birthing attendants and nurses, and if there had been complications transport to the hospital could have been arranged. However to use the words "If she had just" makes it sound like giving birth at the clinic was an easy task. She lived 25 kilometers from the clinic, and even though I have never been in labor, I have heard enough stories that walking that distance while in any stage of labor would be torturous, if not impossible. Also, culturally it is acceptable to have your children at home, and changing an idea about culture is a sensitive subject to breach. Sadly, her story is not that uncommon.
While the chance of maternal death in America is slim to none, the rate in Zambia is alarming. An infant being left orphaned, or a mother left without the child she carried for 9 months is an an acceptably high rate. Formula is not a feasible option for most families, breast milk is what keeps babies alive and healthy. For Veronica, the option of a wet nurse was not possible. In Zambia, only family members can breast feed family members babies, and the only breast feeding family member at the time is HIV positive. Again, this is not an uncommon story.
I cried for Veronica, but I also cried for her mother, and all the mothers like her, who die a senseless death while bringing life into this world. Being a woman in Zambia is difficult, being a mother is even more so. But I salute these mothers, these mothers who love their children dearly, who derive so much happiness from their children. Who work tirelessly and thanklessly for their children. I also salute mothers every where. My cousin just became a mother for the first time this year, along with a dear friend of mine, and I am grateful beyond words that these birth went smoothly and mom and baby are in good health, and thriving. I also got so share part of my life in Zambia with my own mother this year. Mothers are a wonderful thing, and they have an often thankless job. To the mothers of the world. and in my life, I salute you.
What is the solution to reducing maternal mortality rates? While there is never one answer for complex problems, there is a way forward. Helping women to understand why it is important to give birth at the clinic, why it is important to take care of themselves while pregnant, and why it is important to make sure their child gets the right types of foods and are all key first steps. Also getting the fathers to understand and participate in these habits is vital. What I can do as a Peace Corps Volunteer is little, and I struggle with this fact. I can't build more clinics in more remote areas, I can't pave roads and bring ambulances. I can't train midwives or provide bicycles to those that are trained. I can't go preform the deliveries myself. All I can do is talk, and educate, and reach out to mothers, and hope they listen, hope they understand. I am trying to get a safe motherhood promotion group going in my area. My clinic is trying to take steps to keep a program they instituted going to to be promoted. Right now there are outside funds from the UK coming that is allowing the clinic to house mothers in their 9th month of pregnancy, so that when the time comes to give birth, the birth occurs in a safe environment with trained professionals. So all I can do is to be a voice, to be an advocate, and sometimes that is the hardest person to be, because you never know if you are making a difference, if people are actually listening. You just have to hope that one does, so that there is one less baby Veronica in this world.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
My African Bubbie
These two boys (not the baby) are Advent and Terrent, affectionately known as Addy and Tally. They are brothers, they couldn't be more opposite, and they couldn't have a sadder story.
Advent is one of the sweetest children I have ever encountered. I decided this my first few weeks in Fiwila. While most people here, especially children, will throw rocks or sticks at dogs, or even kick them, I saw Advent reprimand another child for doing this, then bend down the pet the dog. While this is a gesture of kindness and decency in American culture, in Zambian culture it is almost unheard of. If I need water, I have to make sure Addy is not around, because if he sees me walking with my water container he will come and take it from me and go get me my water, no matter how much I protest. While the other kids all want their picture taken, sweeties, dollies, peanut butter, bread, plastic bottles and pretty much anything else they can see in my house the only things advent has ever asked for was laundry soap so bambuya (our grandmother) could do laundry and a candle for bambuya. The baby he is holding is Godwin, his cousin whose mother works full time. Though Godwin spends the day at Bambuya's, Addy does a lot of the care for him. I gave Addy a piece of bread with jam on it once and he immediately found Godwin and gave him 90% of the treat.
Tally is the complete opposite, I tell him all the time he is a troublemaker! He does not have a mean or a cruel streak, but he is a little mischievous guy! He only wants to get water for me if he can use my bike, and he's often in trouble for doing something or another. He has the same kind heart as Addy, but he's got a hellion streak in him too. For example, he climbed onto my dish rack and brought the whole thing tumbling down.
I love these boys, and their story weighs heavy on my heart every day. Their father married their mother and had them. Shortly after Tally was born (he is the younger one) the mother decided that she didn't want to be married to their father anymore, nor did she want her children so she dumped them off at her husband's mother's house, my bambuya. Bambuya was a little over 60 at the time, didn't have a job, and had no way to care for the children, so their father agreed to take them. It turned out that he was a raging alcoholic and shortly after taking them, turned them over to his now ex-wife's mother. Later, Bambuya was told through the village grape vine, that she needed to go to Inshinso (about 50 kilometers away on a hilly dirt road) and rescue her grands, they were dying. So Bambuya and another member of the family made the trek. Nothing could have prepared them for what they found.
They found tally, just a little over 2 years at the time, practically unconscious and skeletal. They found Addy, about 5 at this time, out foraging for fruits on the ground for the two of them to eat. The grandmother they were staying with was also a drunk, and would abandon the children for days at a time, and when she was around did not care for them. So bambuya strapped the dying Tally to her hunched and arthritic back, and helped Addy stagger the 50 kilometers back to Fiwila. She had no idea how she would manage to care for these boys, how she would manage to feed them, to send them to school, to cloth them, but at that point it didn't matter, these were her grandchildren, she loved them and if she didn't take them they were going to die.
So Addy and Tally still live with Bambuya. Addy helps her out with a lot around the house, and Bambuya works hard all year to maintain enough crops to feed the three of them (plus the one or two other grandchildren she is usually taking care of). She rents out a house to some school boys and sells some of her cassava so she is able to buy basic supplies for the boys. Last week I brought Addy a belt because his pants did not fit but bambuya didn't have the funds to buy a luxury like a belt, so he was tying his pants up with string, but he never complained. She doesn't know yet how she will send Addy to school after grade 7 when she will have to start to pay school fees. But she loves those boys, she takes care of those boys, she protects, nurtures, and disciplines them. She is raising and loving them, and you can tell the love and respect they have back for her.
I don't have any grandparents that are still alive, I was very blessed to have four wonderful grandparents for part of my life, but now I have none, or rather I had none. Bambuya treats me as one of her own, she calls me a Mulomo, which is the family name, and I have adopted her as my grandmother. When my parents came to visit, the only way I could describe the visit to her was that my American family was coming to meet my Zambian family. This woman is truly an amazing woman with a deep and long history to tell. This is just one of the many great things this great woman has done.
Monday, September 12, 2011
I swear I am actually working here!
In a moment of narcissism, that I prefer to think of as past reflection, I was reading through my blog posts over the past 14 months and realized that many of them could be classified as journal entries, trying to paint a picture of my life, the Zambian bush, and the inner workings of my brain during my service. I have however neglected to discuss much work, probably leaving most of you thinking that here in Peace Corps we really just travel and hang out in the village. So today, I will write some about my work, just so you all can rest at ease that your tax dollars are going to a worthy cause.
One reason I haven't written a lot about work is because it took me a while to find it. This may sound strange, you may be thinking "isn't she living in a developing African country, with one of the worst HIV rates in sub saharan Africa (not to mention the world) out in the village, shouldn't she be overwhelmed by the amount of work that is available" and in thinking this you would be right. However, it is a bit of a delicate situation. In the village community 99.9% of all villagers are subsistence farmers, meaning their entire lives revolve around being farmers and growing enough food for their families, and often families here are not small. Even if parents have only a few children (and this is a rarity) there are usually a rotation of other family members living with the family periodically. For example, my bambuya (grandmother in icilala), though all of her 12 children are grown, is responsible for raising at least three, if not more at any given time, of her grandchildren, many of them single orphans (meaning at least one of their parents is dead, an all too common occurrence in Zambia). So, for most people, their top priority is their fields, their crops, and buying fertilizer for them. So even though there is the need for health education campaigns, it is sometimes hard to convince the community that these things are important. And even if you can convince them that they are important, even if you can train and teach them, getting them to change generations of behavior is its own frustrating challenge.
Finding reliable and honest counterparts also presents its challenges. A counterpart is a person in the village (they can be from the village, or someone from outside such as a teacher or clinic staff member) who helps you with your project, usually is a translator for it, and who often either has a background in the topic or goes to a training with you for the project. The tricky aspect is finding someone who actually wants to be your counterpart because they believe your project is important, and will be dedicated to working withtrainings you for an extended period of time and then continue the work after you leave. Often people want to be counterparts in order to go to , but not to become more knowledgeable, but to get out of the village for x amount of days, stay at a nice guest house, and get a certificate and maybe a little spending money. It's not rare that following a workshop the counterpart abandons you and the project. I was very careful about who I selected as counterparts, though I had my follies, I believe I have found a few good ones. Because the project, if not supported, and understood by the community, will fall apart.
So now a year in, I have two main projects, with good counterparts and community support, that are taking off and will absorb most of the remaining year of my service. For those of you who knew me before coming to Zambia, you will be shocked to learn that both projects focus on children. One is a child nutrition/re-feeding project and the other is the building of a preschool. I have other projects, such as helping to organize and run central provinces annual girls camp Camp GLOW, teaching life skills to high school and upper basic students, hopefully training a neighborhood health committee on what exactly their job is, but my two children projects will be my primary focus for the next 12 months.
PS/Ishiko is the name of the child nutrition program. Me and my friend/counterpart Paxina attended two trainings, each two days long in Kasama in Northern Province. The first training was a training on what the program was. It is an internationally recognized program known as PD/Hearth that PC Zambia has adopted and adapted to be PS/Ishiko. PS stands for Positive Support and Ishiko is the local word for hearth. The program has had great success in Haiti and Mali (in Western Africa) and NGO's such as World Vision and Africare have adopted the program in Zambia. The core concept is to identify malnourished children, re-feed them, teach their mothers the recipes for re-feeding and basic nutrition, and get the children up to a healthy weight and then maintain that weight. The key is to use only local ingredients (for example you wouldn't make eggplant parmesan because the ingredients are not available) and also to identify "positive support families" who are regular villagers i.e. not wealthy whose children are all healthy. Those families help to "support" the mothers enrolled in the program.
We conducted a baseline assessment in the Fiwila community (we will later conduct the same baseline assessments in the outlying communities) and discovered that out of the 114 children we weight and measured, 40.5% of them were malnourished, about 12. 5% of them were severely malnourished! The mothers whose children were malnourished wanted to waste no time they wanted their children in Ishiko sessions NOW. So we invited 13 mothers and their malnourished children, 10 showed up. We spent 12 days together. They learned how to make a porridge that was fully balanced and highly nutritious, bean burgers, and we even went over how to properly feed an under 5 child. When we made a common household meal and they showed me how they fed their children, most of them were just dipping huge lumps of nshima into the relish (vegetables and peanuts). We also discussed nutrition, what is a balanced meal, did 24 hour meal recalls - where they told me what they had fed the children that day and then we discussed what was good and what needed improvement. We also talked about malaria, hand washing, family planning, and identifying what foods are available when. The biggest challenge was that I had no translator during the sessions so I was preforming them in very very broken bemba/lala. On the last day we weight the children and 8 of the 10 had gained at least 400 grams. In the past month 9 of the 10 are still gaining weight. When I return to the village we will conduct home visits and have one of one discussions about HIV/AIDS and Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission.
The preschool project just fell into my lap. It was something that I had thought was needed in the community and had expressed this opinion to people and they always said, that while they agreed they had tried to have preschools before but the teacher was never paid so the school fell apart. I was at a loss, I continued to put feelers out there, letting people know it was something I was interested in. Then something changed, Ba Eden moved back to Fiwila.
Ba Eden grew up in Fiwila, he left and got educated at Copperbelt University and has been working for various USAID funded projects in Zambia. He decided recently that he needed to go back to his "hometown" for lack of a better word, and do work there, so he is now back in Fiwila, on a voluntary basis, trying to "lift the community, life the orphanage, lift the people up". He found out about my interest in a preschool and it has been full speed ahead ever since. Two nuns have volunteered to teach without payment. We held a large meeting with village leaders and teachers the other day and their support was incredible. We will not begin the process of getting the building ready, sensitizing the community to the importance of early childhood education, and set up a training for the nuns. THere are a few villagers who have been trained in how to teach pre-school along with childhood psychology who are going to use the national standard, adapted for Fiwila, to train the sisters to offer the best early childhood education to the children. Parents that have money (for example teachers and clinic staff) will pay a fee so that materials can continue to be bought and maintenance of the building can be done. Those that cannot afford to pay in cash, will pay in kind, either in food, seeds, fertilizer, or even maintaining land within the orphanage. The preschool will be based out of the orphanage and will be directly affiliated with it. We created a "preschool task force" that will begin meeting, planning, designating assignments, and hopefully we will be opening the school in the next 6 months. I will keep you posted.
Both of these projects found me, while I was busy trying to find other work, these found me, engulfed me, taught me, and now hopefully will become integral parts of the community. After all, the children are the future, and without education, proper nutrition and care, parents that are alive, and healthy to care for them and opportunities to better their life, the future would look very bleak. I am just hoping to bring some of these elements to these young children's lives, even if the sight of my terrifies some of them and send them crying into their mothers arms.
Wish me luck! I'll keep you posted!
One reason I haven't written a lot about work is because it took me a while to find it. This may sound strange, you may be thinking "isn't she living in a developing African country, with one of the worst HIV rates in sub saharan Africa (not to mention the world) out in the village, shouldn't she be overwhelmed by the amount of work that is available" and in thinking this you would be right. However, it is a bit of a delicate situation. In the village community 99.9% of all villagers are subsistence farmers, meaning their entire lives revolve around being farmers and growing enough food for their families, and often families here are not small. Even if parents have only a few children (and this is a rarity) there are usually a rotation of other family members living with the family periodically. For example, my bambuya (grandmother in icilala), though all of her 12 children are grown, is responsible for raising at least three, if not more at any given time, of her grandchildren, many of them single orphans (meaning at least one of their parents is dead, an all too common occurrence in Zambia). So, for most people, their top priority is their fields, their crops, and buying fertilizer for them. So even though there is the need for health education campaigns, it is sometimes hard to convince the community that these things are important. And even if you can convince them that they are important, even if you can train and teach them, getting them to change generations of behavior is its own frustrating challenge.
Finding reliable and honest counterparts also presents its challenges. A counterpart is a person in the village (they can be from the village, or someone from outside such as a teacher or clinic staff member) who helps you with your project, usually is a translator for it, and who often either has a background in the topic or goes to a training with you for the project. The tricky aspect is finding someone who actually wants to be your counterpart because they believe your project is important, and will be dedicated to working withtrainings you for an extended period of time and then continue the work after you leave. Often people want to be counterparts in order to go to , but not to become more knowledgeable, but to get out of the village for x amount of days, stay at a nice guest house, and get a certificate and maybe a little spending money. It's not rare that following a workshop the counterpart abandons you and the project. I was very careful about who I selected as counterparts, though I had my follies, I believe I have found a few good ones. Because the project, if not supported, and understood by the community, will fall apart.
So now a year in, I have two main projects, with good counterparts and community support, that are taking off and will absorb most of the remaining year of my service. For those of you who knew me before coming to Zambia, you will be shocked to learn that both projects focus on children. One is a child nutrition/re-feeding project and the other is the building of a preschool. I have other projects, such as helping to organize and run central provinces annual girls camp Camp GLOW, teaching life skills to high school and upper basic students, hopefully training a neighborhood health committee on what exactly their job is, but my two children projects will be my primary focus for the next 12 months.
PS/Ishiko is the name of the child nutrition program. Me and my friend/counterpart Paxina attended two trainings, each two days long in Kasama in Northern Province. The first training was a training on what the program was. It is an internationally recognized program known as PD/Hearth that PC Zambia has adopted and adapted to be PS/Ishiko. PS stands for Positive Support and Ishiko is the local word for hearth. The program has had great success in Haiti and Mali (in Western Africa) and NGO's such as World Vision and Africare have adopted the program in Zambia. The core concept is to identify malnourished children, re-feed them, teach their mothers the recipes for re-feeding and basic nutrition, and get the children up to a healthy weight and then maintain that weight. The key is to use only local ingredients (for example you wouldn't make eggplant parmesan because the ingredients are not available) and also to identify "positive support families" who are regular villagers i.e. not wealthy whose children are all healthy. Those families help to "support" the mothers enrolled in the program.
We conducted a baseline assessment in the Fiwila community (we will later conduct the same baseline assessments in the outlying communities) and discovered that out of the 114 children we weight and measured, 40.5% of them were malnourished, about 12. 5% of them were severely malnourished! The mothers whose children were malnourished wanted to waste no time they wanted their children in Ishiko sessions NOW. So we invited 13 mothers and their malnourished children, 10 showed up. We spent 12 days together. They learned how to make a porridge that was fully balanced and highly nutritious, bean burgers, and we even went over how to properly feed an under 5 child. When we made a common household meal and they showed me how they fed their children, most of them were just dipping huge lumps of nshima into the relish (vegetables and peanuts). We also discussed nutrition, what is a balanced meal, did 24 hour meal recalls - where they told me what they had fed the children that day and then we discussed what was good and what needed improvement. We also talked about malaria, hand washing, family planning, and identifying what foods are available when. The biggest challenge was that I had no translator during the sessions so I was preforming them in very very broken bemba/lala. On the last day we weight the children and 8 of the 10 had gained at least 400 grams. In the past month 9 of the 10 are still gaining weight. When I return to the village we will conduct home visits and have one of one discussions about HIV/AIDS and Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission.
The preschool project just fell into my lap. It was something that I had thought was needed in the community and had expressed this opinion to people and they always said, that while they agreed they had tried to have preschools before but the teacher was never paid so the school fell apart. I was at a loss, I continued to put feelers out there, letting people know it was something I was interested in. Then something changed, Ba Eden moved back to Fiwila.
Ba Eden grew up in Fiwila, he left and got educated at Copperbelt University and has been working for various USAID funded projects in Zambia. He decided recently that he needed to go back to his "hometown" for lack of a better word, and do work there, so he is now back in Fiwila, on a voluntary basis, trying to "lift the community, life the orphanage, lift the people up". He found out about my interest in a preschool and it has been full speed ahead ever since. Two nuns have volunteered to teach without payment. We held a large meeting with village leaders and teachers the other day and their support was incredible. We will not begin the process of getting the building ready, sensitizing the community to the importance of early childhood education, and set up a training for the nuns. THere are a few villagers who have been trained in how to teach pre-school along with childhood psychology who are going to use the national standard, adapted for Fiwila, to train the sisters to offer the best early childhood education to the children. Parents that have money (for example teachers and clinic staff) will pay a fee so that materials can continue to be bought and maintenance of the building can be done. Those that cannot afford to pay in cash, will pay in kind, either in food, seeds, fertilizer, or even maintaining land within the orphanage. The preschool will be based out of the orphanage and will be directly affiliated with it. We created a "preschool task force" that will begin meeting, planning, designating assignments, and hopefully we will be opening the school in the next 6 months. I will keep you posted.
Both of these projects found me, while I was busy trying to find other work, these found me, engulfed me, taught me, and now hopefully will become integral parts of the community. After all, the children are the future, and without education, proper nutrition and care, parents that are alive, and healthy to care for them and opportunities to better their life, the future would look very bleak. I am just hoping to bring some of these elements to these young children's lives, even if the sight of my terrifies some of them and send them crying into their mothers arms.
Wish me luck! I'll keep you posted!
Friday, May 27, 2011
Where There Is No GPS
So yesterday I was out in the bush, desperately trying to find a meeting that it turned out wasn't ever scheduled, trying in the limited amount of icilala I know to find out where Tazara West was and once I was in it how to get to the depot (pronounced de-pot). My bike chain was full of sand, and I was exhausted from the 30k bike ride and all day "how to run an under 5 clinic" workshop (which seemed to be a huge success, though I won't judge for sure until after they continuously hold under 5 clinics in their community) I had done in Chibanga the day before. I had also managed to get myself lost in the bush earlier that day trying to find the stream to wash my clothes in, so the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to be biking through sand trying to find a meeting. I had my ipod on shuffle and had been listening to a variety of america house and pop music when I finally decided I had had enough and was going to head home. At that moment I looked up and took my headphones out, because I had to stop and take in what I was looking at. The maize field in front of me had been harvested and lay in dead dry stalks across the ground. A weed had overtaken the field, it's tall with soft downy red on the top, it blows quite beautifully in the wind. Behind this was a grove of dark green trees, and behind that a dark purple mountain shrouded in fog. It was a beautiful, peaceful moment. Suddenly all the frustration from not finding the meeting spot (and later finding out that the meeting had never been scheduled in the first place- classic pc zambia volunteer conundrum), the exhaustion from bike riding and bush path blazing, the homesickness that still comes in unexpected and unusual waves was all worth it for this moment. It not only made me appreciate the beauty of the place I am now calling home, but also an appreciation of the people I live with and interact with on a daily basis, and an excitement for the work I am finally starting in the village. I have a quote on my wall "there is a lot in life that is hard, but find the good" Life as a peace corps volunteer isn't always the beautiful and magical life that I had envisioned, but I'm starting to learn when is anything ever what exactly what we envisioned. Not that I don't have the beautiful and magical moments, and this was one of them. I appreciate those moments so much more now, not because they are rare, but because they are beautiful, and usually they are all mine, I don't have to share these moments with anyone, sometimes it's the only moment I feel truly alone in any given day.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Newness
With every loss, there is always something to gain. We bid farewell on Friday too our volunteer's COS'ing (Close of Service) and welcomed our new LIFE (which is the PC Zambia agriculture program) volunteers on Sunday. They are still in training but stopped by for the night on the way back to Lusaka following second site visit. We are getting 7 volunteers from LIFE and 4 RED (the education program) volunteers. It's exciting to get new volunteers and puts your service into perspective. 6 months ago I was the new volunteer, scared shitless, showing up at the house for the night following second site visit, and now I'm the one answering questions, discussing challenges, and trying my best to make them feel welcome. Central Province is an amazing province, we are like a little family here, and having other volunteers that support you and allow you to come and just vent about what was hard in your village, or help you celebrate your successes, no matter how small, is key to keeping you going.
So at the end of the month we're going to be "sophomores" and the intake that was a year before us are going to be "seniors" and will be COS'ing before we know it.
I went to a nutrition workshop up in Northern Province, and I'm hoping to implement the program in my village. It's called PS/Ishiko. PS stands for Positive Support and Ishiko is the Bemba word for hearth. The idea of the program is that it is the community teaching the community. First we do an initial baseline assessment to identify the malnourished children in the community, while at the same time identifying the very healthy children. From there we ask some of the mothers of the healthy children to be our "positive support mothers" and then we set up Ishiko sessions, where 10-12 mothers and their children attend for two weeks and we teach them how to cook meals high in nutritional value. One day they learn how to prepare it and feed it to the kids and the next day they prepare it and feed it to the kids. The hope is to get the kids re-nourished during the 2 weeks then have the mothers continue to keep them nourished. I did a test run observation during my under 5 clinic last week and noticed that about 75% of the children were under their baseline weight. Starting this week I will be training my volunteers to collect the data since I will be in Tanzania during child health week, then in August we will have our first Ishiko session. In the mean time we need to start having meeting with the NHC's (Neighborhood health committees), local leaders, and the church in order to sensitize the community to the program. The hope is that after I leave they will continue to make the baseline assessments and hold the Ishiko sessions. It should take about a year to complete the program, so I am looking forward to getting started. It is also going to be conducted in my entire catchment area, which is really good because I haven't had a lot of exposure in the surrounding villages. I struggle with that because the person that is supossed to be helping me to go to meetings in the other communities, and i need him because I need him to translate for me. He is a wonderful person and very hardworking but I get very frustrated with him because its hard to catch him in a free minute.
The weather is changing its starting to get really cold at night and in the mornings. The rains should be going soon and we'll move into dry cold season. So, new programs, new weather, new volunteers.
Much love to all of you!
So at the end of the month we're going to be "sophomores" and the intake that was a year before us are going to be "seniors" and will be COS'ing before we know it.
I went to a nutrition workshop up in Northern Province, and I'm hoping to implement the program in my village. It's called PS/Ishiko. PS stands for Positive Support and Ishiko is the Bemba word for hearth. The idea of the program is that it is the community teaching the community. First we do an initial baseline assessment to identify the malnourished children in the community, while at the same time identifying the very healthy children. From there we ask some of the mothers of the healthy children to be our "positive support mothers" and then we set up Ishiko sessions, where 10-12 mothers and their children attend for two weeks and we teach them how to cook meals high in nutritional value. One day they learn how to prepare it and feed it to the kids and the next day they prepare it and feed it to the kids. The hope is to get the kids re-nourished during the 2 weeks then have the mothers continue to keep them nourished. I did a test run observation during my under 5 clinic last week and noticed that about 75% of the children were under their baseline weight. Starting this week I will be training my volunteers to collect the data since I will be in Tanzania during child health week, then in August we will have our first Ishiko session. In the mean time we need to start having meeting with the NHC's (Neighborhood health committees), local leaders, and the church in order to sensitize the community to the program. The hope is that after I leave they will continue to make the baseline assessments and hold the Ishiko sessions. It should take about a year to complete the program, so I am looking forward to getting started. It is also going to be conducted in my entire catchment area, which is really good because I haven't had a lot of exposure in the surrounding villages. I struggle with that because the person that is supossed to be helping me to go to meetings in the other communities, and i need him because I need him to translate for me. He is a wonderful person and very hardworking but I get very frustrated with him because its hard to catch him in a free minute.
The weather is changing its starting to get really cold at night and in the mornings. The rains should be going soon and we'll move into dry cold season. So, new programs, new weather, new volunteers.
Much love to all of you!
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Remember the Starfish
So at the end of this month (March) I will have been in country for 8 months and in my village for 6 months, which means I will have completed 25% of my 2 year service. I have mixed feelings about this. One one side I can't believe I have been living in Fiwila for 6 months now, it feels like home. On the other hand, for the first time since I found out I was going to Zambia in June 2010, two years suddenly feels long, like I am going to be here forever. It suddenly hit me the commitment that I have made and realized that there is still a lot of time left in Zambia. At the same time I have no interest in returning home permanently, but there is this part of me that wishes I could come home for just a week to see my friends and family, breathe some San Francisco air, hit up Tahoe, and eat some sushi. It's a feeling I have not yet experienced here, and I feel that I have gone through a myriad of emotions here, from being in love to having my heart broken, from elation to sadness, illness, boredom, fear, happiness, loneliness, but this is the first time that homesickness has hit, and I am struggling with the best way to cope with this new emotion. I am not worried about the coping, but I am not quite sure how to handle it, it is not an emotion that I am used to experiencing.
At the same time, I feel like this is an amazing time not only in my life, but also in the life of so many of those that I love. I have several friends and family members embarking on new and exciting adventures in their lives all over the world, the times they truly are a changin! The effects and existence of globalization is on display constantly in Zambia, the world is truly growing smaller by the day! Even though I live 90k out in the bush, with little to no network (cell phone coverage), no electricity, and no running water, the clinic has a solar powered cooler for vaccines that is powered by BP Solar and funded by Japan. Obama is truly the worlds president, one can buy Obama EVERYTHING here ranging from umbrellas, shirts, chitenge's and even underwear. Pop hits from America play on the radio, and I am able to skype people back home, or wherever they may be finding themselves, for free and hear their voices and see their faces. When you think back that at one point places were so isolated and cultural exchange was so limited it is shocking.
There are things here that are so different, yet others that are so similar. I went to my friend who is a teacher's house for lunch one day and her son was telling her about all the exciting things that happened at school that day. Teenagers are teenagers, wherever they are. I am teaching grade 11 biology at the high school right now, and I am really enjoying the opportunity to get to know the kids because they won't reach out to me. There are cliques within the students, and one of the biggest struggles is discussing sexual health with them. They have the mentality of any teenager anywhere in the world "I am invincible and it won't happen to me" and unable to think about the future, so there are several students that are having unprotected sex. I am hoping that the students will view me as a peer, and not a superior, and they will feel comfortable coming to be to talk about sex, HIV/AIDS, STI's, pregnancy, and marriage. A lot of times the teachers get upset because they don't think the students are working very hard, and sometimes even say they aren't smart, but my students are very sharp, they have asked some very good questions. We are moving a bit slower than I would like to be moving, mostly because the students do not have copies of the textbook so for all terms and pictures I have to write them on the board, I cannot assign them the material to read and learn the day before, I wish there was a way to get them books, but I think I will have a hard time motivating them to start some kind of IGA (income generating activity) for just one year. The students, and the youth in general, are the generation of change and the future of any country, and society, even any community, and I am hoping to have the opportunity to make these students feel empowered and that they can do anything they want with a bit of hard work and determination.
There is a story that I read to myself a lot, in order to keep me motivated. A lot of people come to Peace Corps with the notion that they're going to change the world, if they can just tell their community how to keep themselves healthy then they will do it. I think anyone who denies coming in without even a touch of this idealism is in denial, you want to think if your coming all this way and staying for so long your going to make a big difference. The thing is, you learn quickly that you may only make a difference in a few people's lives, you may never see your work come to fruition, especially when working in health, and that there will be resistance, corruption, apathy, and a lot of volunteers become jaded because of this. While your ideals are questioned and adjusted, I find it vital to my mental health that I repeat this story to myself often, and never forget the meaning of it.
There was a wise old man walking down the beach late at night. He looked up ahead and saw a young woman throwing starfish from the shore into the ocean. Curious, he hurried to catch up to her and asked her what she was doing. She replied that when the sun rose any of the starfish that were still on the shore would die, so she was throwing them back into the sea to save them. The old man looked at her sadly and said "there are thousands of starfish, and the beach is hundreds of miles long, how can you make a difference?" The young woman looked at the starfish in her hands and said "it makes a difference for this one"
Support, from current volunteers and from friends and family is so vital. It keeps you grounded, it picks you up when your feeling like your failing, or not doing a good enough job, or enough work. I am hard on myself, I think a lot of Peace Corps volunteers are hard on themselves, and the encouragement and support from home allows you to be kind to yourself, which is also a very important thing to remember to do.
Please keep in touch, your letters/emails/packages/new york times articles/sms's mean more to me than you will ever know! Much love to all, happy spring in America, and everywhere in the northern hemisphere for that matter.
At the same time, I feel like this is an amazing time not only in my life, but also in the life of so many of those that I love. I have several friends and family members embarking on new and exciting adventures in their lives all over the world, the times they truly are a changin! The effects and existence of globalization is on display constantly in Zambia, the world is truly growing smaller by the day! Even though I live 90k out in the bush, with little to no network (cell phone coverage), no electricity, and no running water, the clinic has a solar powered cooler for vaccines that is powered by BP Solar and funded by Japan. Obama is truly the worlds president, one can buy Obama EVERYTHING here ranging from umbrellas, shirts, chitenge's and even underwear. Pop hits from America play on the radio, and I am able to skype people back home, or wherever they may be finding themselves, for free and hear their voices and see their faces. When you think back that at one point places were so isolated and cultural exchange was so limited it is shocking.
There are things here that are so different, yet others that are so similar. I went to my friend who is a teacher's house for lunch one day and her son was telling her about all the exciting things that happened at school that day. Teenagers are teenagers, wherever they are. I am teaching grade 11 biology at the high school right now, and I am really enjoying the opportunity to get to know the kids because they won't reach out to me. There are cliques within the students, and one of the biggest struggles is discussing sexual health with them. They have the mentality of any teenager anywhere in the world "I am invincible and it won't happen to me" and unable to think about the future, so there are several students that are having unprotected sex. I am hoping that the students will view me as a peer, and not a superior, and they will feel comfortable coming to be to talk about sex, HIV/AIDS, STI's, pregnancy, and marriage. A lot of times the teachers get upset because they don't think the students are working very hard, and sometimes even say they aren't smart, but my students are very sharp, they have asked some very good questions. We are moving a bit slower than I would like to be moving, mostly because the students do not have copies of the textbook so for all terms and pictures I have to write them on the board, I cannot assign them the material to read and learn the day before, I wish there was a way to get them books, but I think I will have a hard time motivating them to start some kind of IGA (income generating activity) for just one year. The students, and the youth in general, are the generation of change and the future of any country, and society, even any community, and I am hoping to have the opportunity to make these students feel empowered and that they can do anything they want with a bit of hard work and determination.
There is a story that I read to myself a lot, in order to keep me motivated. A lot of people come to Peace Corps with the notion that they're going to change the world, if they can just tell their community how to keep themselves healthy then they will do it. I think anyone who denies coming in without even a touch of this idealism is in denial, you want to think if your coming all this way and staying for so long your going to make a big difference. The thing is, you learn quickly that you may only make a difference in a few people's lives, you may never see your work come to fruition, especially when working in health, and that there will be resistance, corruption, apathy, and a lot of volunteers become jaded because of this. While your ideals are questioned and adjusted, I find it vital to my mental health that I repeat this story to myself often, and never forget the meaning of it.
There was a wise old man walking down the beach late at night. He looked up ahead and saw a young woman throwing starfish from the shore into the ocean. Curious, he hurried to catch up to her and asked her what she was doing. She replied that when the sun rose any of the starfish that were still on the shore would die, so she was throwing them back into the sea to save them. The old man looked at her sadly and said "there are thousands of starfish, and the beach is hundreds of miles long, how can you make a difference?" The young woman looked at the starfish in her hands and said "it makes a difference for this one"
Support, from current volunteers and from friends and family is so vital. It keeps you grounded, it picks you up when your feeling like your failing, or not doing a good enough job, or enough work. I am hard on myself, I think a lot of Peace Corps volunteers are hard on themselves, and the encouragement and support from home allows you to be kind to yourself, which is also a very important thing to remember to do.
Please keep in touch, your letters/emails/packages/new york times articles/sms's mean more to me than you will ever know! Much love to all, happy spring in America, and everywhere in the northern hemisphere for that matter.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Some Photos from Zambia
This is my garden, I am incredibly proud of this, probably more proud than anything I've ever done before because it was completely new and I had no idea what I was doing. I actually did research on how to take care of it and did it all by myself (except the planting part my neighbor helped me). I have fallen in love with gardening, especially in the village there is something meditative about it, I love going out there are the end of the day and weeding, watering, fertilizing it. At IST (In Service Training) which I just had in Lusaka I learned about perma gardening and composting (I've been doing some independent research) and I am really excited when I get back to my village to do some more work on it. Currently I am growing tomatoes, green beans and kale. I have been out of the village for over a month now however with illness, vacation, and training, so I am hoping it has not been overtaken by weeds. I am hoping my community will be receptive to sustainable farming techniques that I have learned and hope to teach them
Itala Market, Mkushi BOMA, Central Province, Zambia. This is what we call "old market" in Mkushi, its actually where the Zambians shop. Mkushi BOMA has a lot of commercial farmers (most of who are white, most of who are South African or Zimbabwaean, though some are Zambian) and all of them are wealthy and tend to shop in the wealthier part of Mkushi a.k.a. the most expensive part. This is the part where the common Zambia shops, and where I prefer to shop. It goes far back from the main road, and is a maze that is full of vendors selling everything from fish, vegetables, peanut butter and caterpillars, to termites (also supossed to be quite tasty) and even once I was offered someone's baby for purchase! The first time I went to this market it was about 100 degrees out and swarmed with people and I was trying to buy so many things for my hut, I was incredibly overwhelmed, but now I am not intimidated by it at all. Sometimes the best way to become comfortable with something is to dive into it head first, even if you are pushed.
This is Regina, one of the kids that lives on my compound. She is such a sweet girl and is the mother hen of all the other children. I have tried numerous things to try and get her to go to school and she won't go. One of the biggest problems in the village is getting the kids to go to school. Some places don't even have schools, and after grade 7 students must pay school fees, which are often outside of the family budget. Things become especially tight because most Zambia families, especially in the village, have several children (I feel like 4-6 is average, sometimes more, sometimes less) so sometimes only one child can be sent to school. The parents are also always busy out in the fields so they are rarely there to enforce the children going to school and many parents do not see the benefit of an education, especially for girl children, and particularly in the village. Part of what I want to do in my village is work on budgeting and family planning with the villagers and really stress the importance of education and providing for one's family.
This is my family in Kabeleka, Chongwe District, Lusaka Province. This was the host family I stayed with for 9 weeks during PST (Pre Service Training) To my right is my Bataata, George, and to my right his wife my Bamaayo, Hilda. The three boys are Graveson (the tallest) Keshash, and Mwanza (the baby) James, the oldest son, isn't pictured he was visiting his grandmother during school break. It is so interesting because there are some things that are so incredibly similar, like visiting your grandma on school holiday, to Zambian childhood, yet so much that is drastically different!
This is my house in Fiwila Village. Lizzy and Allie have dubbed it a face house, a Koala Bear face house to be exact so I think it will be taking on that persona. I am working panono panono to get it to feel like home, constantly making adjustments, upgrades, and additions (and subtractions/alterations for that matter) I am going to try and get ahold of some chalkboard paint and paint one side of the house with it so the kids can draw with chalk on it whenever they want...if you are sending me a package, please feel free to include some chalk for the iwe's! (kids)
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Magical Malawi
I celebrated my first Christmas in my entire life without my family this year, even when I studied abroad in India I was fortunate enough to finish in time to spend the holidays with my family in Thailand. This year I was still with family though, my Peace Corps Family. The amazing part about Peace Corps Zambia (as I cannot speak for Peace Corps in other countries) is that you really do feel that the other PCV's here are your family. I started the holiday season off a bit nervous, as a simple mosquito bite turned into a very bad case of cellulitus on my left ankle, causing me to not only be able to walk, but also causing a fever and making my medical team quite nervous. I went to the hospital in Mkushi again, in which I am becoming a familiar face, much to my own disappointment, and was given IV antibiotics along with a 5 day course of oral antibiotics. The hospital that I am sent to in Mkushi is amazing though. It is a private clinic where I have so far received an abdominal ultrasound, (to check on my liver post malaria because it had swelled and was painful) bloodwork, antibiotics twice, IV antibiotics and had two appointments with Zambia physicians trained in the UK. They have taken extraordinary care of me and it has been the fastest medical care I have ever received. After reassuring my medical team that I was not going to need to be admitted to the hospital it was off to Serenje for about a week to recover. The thing about the village is that infections, especially when they are in your feet/ankles or hands are very hard to keep clean and also have difficulty healing. By Christmas eve however I was well, and me and some friends spent Christmas eve hitchhiking from Serenje to Lusaka for a few days. Christmas dinner was spent with a large group of volunteers, mostly from my intake but also from other intakes. It is also great to meet other volunteers from other provinces and intakes. They reassure you that everything you feel is normal, and are usually great resources to talk to about everything from village projects to travel plans. So far there has been no one in Peace Corps that I have met that I haven't liked, Zambia must just attract an amazing group of people. While I wasn't able to spend Christmas driving around looking at lights and opening presents under the tree with my family, it was still an amazing, and very unique, time.
The next day it was time for vacation to start. 13 of us from my intake hitchhiked and bussed our way up to Nkhata Bay in Malawi (which took 2 days from Lusaka, we stopped over in Chipata in Eastern Province for the night), for a well deserved vacation. When we first arrived we had grand plans, including hikes, walks, runs, exploration of the area, lots of reading, and eating just peanut butter and bread. These plans were quickly abandoned and we indulged in luxuries we haven't known for a while. What might these luxuries have been? We were able to wear bathing suits all day, our thighs actually saw sunlight (in Zambia it is very risqué to show one's thighs, subsequently, even with sunscreen we all sustained sunburns to our thighs). We were able to sleep in, we didn't have to sweep, cook, ward off rodents, or carry water. We ate meals that we didn't have to cook over braziers that were simple delicious and just relaxed and caught up on the past three months. Many of us hadn't seen each other since we swore in September 24th and it was wonderful to catch up with people. We spent our days in the sun, swimming in the lake, lounging. The lake was beautiful, the water was blue and crystal clear, almost Caribbean. We stayed at a guest house called Mayoka Village, and we very rarely left. We met other PCV's that work in Malawi, along with other travelers mostly from South Africa. It is also interesting to meet travelers from other places and discuss how life is similar and how life is different in our home countries. It was truly the perfect vacation. On the last night three of us cooked dinner for the guests and managed to pull it off. Malawi time is very similar to Zamtime, life just moves at a slower pace. However, at 6 o'clock we began cooking, and on the menu was chili, roasted vegetable salad, and cornbread. We had about 2 hours to prepare the entire meal from scratch and we were a bit nervous it was going to be a complete disaster. However, the owners Kathryn and Gary along with the kitchen staff pitched in and after two hours of feverish vegetable cutting, bread making, cooking, stirring, and literally sweating we pulled off a fantastic meal which is now going to be added to the Mayoka menu as Peace Corps Zambia Chili. So we even got to leave our mark there.
Vacation has now come to an end, and tomorrow I will be headed to Lusaka. On Monday we will start a two week training called IST (In Service Training) and it will mark the official end of our community entry. Everyone from our intake will be there and we will be learning things like perma-gardening, bee keeping, and also have sessions specific to our program. This is the first time that our entire intake will be together following swear in and it will be fantastic, and bizarre, to see everyone again. It's a bit strange, you spend two months with a group of people, see them every day for the entire day, become very close and then your separated for three months only to be thrown back together three months later. No one has E.T.'d so far so everyone will be there, and it will be so interesting to hear how everyone's experience is going!
Right after we finish IST, the new intake is flying in! I will have also been in country for 6 months. Suddenly, we aren't the new kids anymore! It really does blow your mind, some days feel so long, but then you realize that you've been here for 6 months, and then you think back to everything you were feeling right before flying in, when you arrived, when you were posted. How scared, overwhelmed, and excited you felt and the immense amount of anticipation you feel. And then suddenly, you've been here 6 months and while the experience is nothing like you expected it to be, you really feel this is my life, it doesn't feel uncomfortable or unnatural anymore, but rather feel natural. And then when you are sitting on Lake Malawi, looking out across the lake with someone that 7 months ago you never knew even existed and now you couldn't imagine your life without them, or your in the village out in the fields helping to cultivate a field with your best friend who is a villager in Zambia, or your listening to a conversation in Bemba and you actually understand what is going on, and suddenly you have this overwhelming feeling of awe, amazement, and happiness. I really have been given an incredible opportunity, not only to try and make the world a better place, which is a much harder job than I ever could have imagined, but also to get to know yourself, and who you are without anyone else to create your identity for you. Many people do not get this opportunity and I am eternally grateful for it.
I will hopefully be getting some pictures up in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out on facebook! Also again, as always, feel free to send me letters, postcards, notes, articles, pictures, anything to my address:
Natalie Neft, PCV
Peace Corps
P.O. Box 840038
Mkushi, Zambia
you can also always send me an email natalieneft@gmail.com however, my internet access is very very limited and it will take longer for me to email you back than it will for a letter to reach you.
Cheers to a wonderful 2011
The next day it was time for vacation to start. 13 of us from my intake hitchhiked and bussed our way up to Nkhata Bay in Malawi (which took 2 days from Lusaka, we stopped over in Chipata in Eastern Province for the night), for a well deserved vacation. When we first arrived we had grand plans, including hikes, walks, runs, exploration of the area, lots of reading, and eating just peanut butter and bread. These plans were quickly abandoned and we indulged in luxuries we haven't known for a while. What might these luxuries have been? We were able to wear bathing suits all day, our thighs actually saw sunlight (in Zambia it is very risqué to show one's thighs, subsequently, even with sunscreen we all sustained sunburns to our thighs). We were able to sleep in, we didn't have to sweep, cook, ward off rodents, or carry water. We ate meals that we didn't have to cook over braziers that were simple delicious and just relaxed and caught up on the past three months. Many of us hadn't seen each other since we swore in September 24th and it was wonderful to catch up with people. We spent our days in the sun, swimming in the lake, lounging. The lake was beautiful, the water was blue and crystal clear, almost Caribbean. We stayed at a guest house called Mayoka Village, and we very rarely left. We met other PCV's that work in Malawi, along with other travelers mostly from South Africa. It is also interesting to meet travelers from other places and discuss how life is similar and how life is different in our home countries. It was truly the perfect vacation. On the last night three of us cooked dinner for the guests and managed to pull it off. Malawi time is very similar to Zamtime, life just moves at a slower pace. However, at 6 o'clock we began cooking, and on the menu was chili, roasted vegetable salad, and cornbread. We had about 2 hours to prepare the entire meal from scratch and we were a bit nervous it was going to be a complete disaster. However, the owners Kathryn and Gary along with the kitchen staff pitched in and after two hours of feverish vegetable cutting, bread making, cooking, stirring, and literally sweating we pulled off a fantastic meal which is now going to be added to the Mayoka menu as Peace Corps Zambia Chili. So we even got to leave our mark there.
Vacation has now come to an end, and tomorrow I will be headed to Lusaka. On Monday we will start a two week training called IST (In Service Training) and it will mark the official end of our community entry. Everyone from our intake will be there and we will be learning things like perma-gardening, bee keeping, and also have sessions specific to our program. This is the first time that our entire intake will be together following swear in and it will be fantastic, and bizarre, to see everyone again. It's a bit strange, you spend two months with a group of people, see them every day for the entire day, become very close and then your separated for three months only to be thrown back together three months later. No one has E.T.'d so far so everyone will be there, and it will be so interesting to hear how everyone's experience is going!
Right after we finish IST, the new intake is flying in! I will have also been in country for 6 months. Suddenly, we aren't the new kids anymore! It really does blow your mind, some days feel so long, but then you realize that you've been here for 6 months, and then you think back to everything you were feeling right before flying in, when you arrived, when you were posted. How scared, overwhelmed, and excited you felt and the immense amount of anticipation you feel. And then suddenly, you've been here 6 months and while the experience is nothing like you expected it to be, you really feel this is my life, it doesn't feel uncomfortable or unnatural anymore, but rather feel natural. And then when you are sitting on Lake Malawi, looking out across the lake with someone that 7 months ago you never knew even existed and now you couldn't imagine your life without them, or your in the village out in the fields helping to cultivate a field with your best friend who is a villager in Zambia, or your listening to a conversation in Bemba and you actually understand what is going on, and suddenly you have this overwhelming feeling of awe, amazement, and happiness. I really have been given an incredible opportunity, not only to try and make the world a better place, which is a much harder job than I ever could have imagined, but also to get to know yourself, and who you are without anyone else to create your identity for you. Many people do not get this opportunity and I am eternally grateful for it.
I will hopefully be getting some pictures up in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out on facebook! Also again, as always, feel free to send me letters, postcards, notes, articles, pictures, anything to my address:
Natalie Neft, PCV
Peace Corps
P.O. Box 840038
Mkushi, Zambia
you can also always send me an email natalieneft@gmail.com however, my internet access is very very limited and it will take longer for me to email you back than it will for a letter to reach you.
Cheers to a wonderful 2011
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