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!
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