The Epic Health Seminar, Act I
My superhero team of PCVs arrived on Tuesday March 5th to prep for the seminar. We made mosquito masks, finished posters, shelled some peas, and cooked a yummy dinner.
Day 1 of the seminar we rolled out of bed at 6AM for coffee and oatmeal before we started trying to rally the troops to attend the seminar. To hold a meeting in my community, one needs to hit a metal hubcap hanging on a string of the meeting house with a piece of rebar. The whole town can hear and eventually starts meeting. If you want to start a meeting at 8, you need to start ringing the bell at 7, and then you will probably start shortly before 9. Miraculously, people were seated and ready to go with nametags by 8:30, early by Embera standards!
I started off the seminar with a conversation about the health information I learned from the survey, and by trying to put what those numbers mean into a context they understand. To illustrate just how many 97 illnesses was in one month, I dumped 97 beans into a pot. I then dumped in another 1100 beans to illustrate how many illnesses that is in a year.
We then calculated basic costs of being ill, from transport to the health to center to just adding up lost wages from a day in bed, to the academic cost for children by not attending school. When I brought to their attention that just missing 2 days of school a month means missing almost 3 weeks of class, I got a lot of shocked faces from the moms in the group.
I then asked them about the other costs- the stress of the family when a parent is sick, the concern of a parent when a child is sick, the fear of the community when a neighbor is sick, the grief of losing a friend or family member, and the pain of burying your own child. I know 14 mothers in my audience had lost a child at some point, so I know that my point- that we need to do something to decrease the number of illnesses in Playona- had hit home.
After that we presented them with a diagram that show disease transmission, the ways that disease is transmitted from poop and introduced into our bodies. We took a break for snacks and invited the entire school, K-9, some 85 kids over to join us for the play.
Yes, we did a play. OF COURSE we did a play. More like a skit, but there was a set, costumes, and props. We used kids from the school to be the family members of the show and I read the narrative, while they had to act out what happened. It was a day in the life of a typical Embera family...with many appearances of the infamous POOP MONSTER! Everyone laughed a lot and I think they understood bacteria transmission a little bit better!
We had a post show discussion and gave a play by play of the show then presented them with the 4 main topics of the seminar: Handwashing, Clean Water, Latrines, and Clean House. In Spanish these are the 4 Ls. (Lavando Manos, Agua Limpia, Letrinas, Casa Limpia) We broke for lunch and the PCVs prepped the afternoon.
Our afternoon included the Health Olympics, a series of games that promoted the ideas of the 4 Ls, roughly, while mostly just giving them an opportunity have fun and be involved and not be sitting in a boring meeting hall. The games included a handwashing relay, a turd bean bag toss/tag, trash blog tag, and a blindfolded relay race to get water from a bucket to a pot. We ended with a trash clean up race that took each team less than 5 minutes to finish. (Note to self, we need more trash bags next time!)
After that the PCVs retreated to my hut exhausted to bathe in the river, make dinner, and chill.
Day 1 of the seminar we rolled out of bed at 6AM for coffee and oatmeal before we started trying to rally the troops to attend the seminar. To hold a meeting in my community, one needs to hit a metal hubcap hanging on a string of the meeting house with a piece of rebar. The whole town can hear and eventually starts meeting. If you want to start a meeting at 8, you need to start ringing the bell at 7, and then you will probably start shortly before 9. Miraculously, people were seated and ready to go with nametags by 8:30, early by Embera standards!
I started off the seminar with a conversation about the health information I learned from the survey, and by trying to put what those numbers mean into a context they understand. To illustrate just how many 97 illnesses was in one month, I dumped 97 beans into a pot. I then dumped in another 1100 beans to illustrate how many illnesses that is in a year.
We then calculated basic costs of being ill, from transport to the health to center to just adding up lost wages from a day in bed, to the academic cost for children by not attending school. When I brought to their attention that just missing 2 days of school a month means missing almost 3 weeks of class, I got a lot of shocked faces from the moms in the group.
I then asked them about the other costs- the stress of the family when a parent is sick, the concern of a parent when a child is sick, the fear of the community when a neighbor is sick, the grief of losing a friend or family member, and the pain of burying your own child. I know 14 mothers in my audience had lost a child at some point, so I know that my point- that we need to do something to decrease the number of illnesses in Playona- had hit home.
After that we presented them with a diagram that show disease transmission, the ways that disease is transmitted from poop and introduced into our bodies. We took a break for snacks and invited the entire school, K-9, some 85 kids over to join us for the play.
Yes, we did a play. OF COURSE we did a play. More like a skit, but there was a set, costumes, and props. We used kids from the school to be the family members of the show and I read the narrative, while they had to act out what happened. It was a day in the life of a typical Embera family...with many appearances of the infamous POOP MONSTER! Everyone laughed a lot and I think they understood bacteria transmission a little bit better!
We had a post show discussion and gave a play by play of the show then presented them with the 4 main topics of the seminar: Handwashing, Clean Water, Latrines, and Clean House. In Spanish these are the 4 Ls. (Lavando Manos, Agua Limpia, Letrinas, Casa Limpia) We broke for lunch and the PCVs prepped the afternoon.
Our afternoon included the Health Olympics, a series of games that promoted the ideas of the 4 Ls, roughly, while mostly just giving them an opportunity have fun and be involved and not be sitting in a boring meeting hall. The games included a handwashing relay, a turd bean bag toss/tag, trash blog tag, and a blindfolded relay race to get water from a bucket to a pot. We ended with a trash clean up race that took each team less than 5 minutes to finish. (Note to self, we need more trash bags next time!)
After that the PCVs retreated to my hut exhausted to bathe in the river, make dinner, and chill.
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