Diagnoses, Education, and Update

Lois Park posted an incredible entry on her blog, loispark.blogspot.com. She’s the third intern working for GAF and NOW this summer, and she has designed, implemented, and is now running a feeding project for malnourished children in Masiaka, near Freetown. She’s living in much more hardcore conditions than Katie and me, and is always upbeat and positive.
Katie blogged a bit about the appalling maternal mortality and female genital mutilation practices of this country. Together with domestic abuse and an overtly patriarchal society, it’s a perfect storm for women. We know hardly any women, and most women we have seen are laden with babies and work. We walked back to the clinic with Siah Sumana, Sasseko’s wife. She had walked the two kilometers to and from the market with her eight-months-pregnant belly, and on the way back she was carrying a bundle of sticks on her head and a bag of food in her hand. We carried the sticks for her, but while she walked she placed her free hand under her belly for support.
There is hope. Many of the young Sierra Leonean men and women we speak with are very concerned about making sure and allowing “the girl child” to go to school. Education is essential to help the women of Sierra Leone. If the local economic climate can improve through agriculture – perhaps palm oil? – then there will be more money, more jobs, and more incentive to allow women to pursue careers of their own.
Currently we are working on finishing up the community health education for the survey we are conducting, then we are going to complete a draft of a business plan for the palm oil farm that will fund the clinic operating expenses, and then we are going to write out a framework for a peer education program that NOW will put into action in the fall. The focus of the peer education program, to start, is teenage pregnancy, and both Katie and I are very excited by its potential. Everywhere we go, the people ask us to speak directly with their children about this issue, and the recognition of the importance of education is almost unanimous. One of my new posts is an account of our recent health education in Yomandu, and it gives some insight to the type and nature of questions we field.
We’ve also been spending some more time in the clinic, and I love it. I’ve posted a couple of stories of diagnoses, because I think the progression of learning about a patient and what is troubling them and then trying to formulate both a diagnosis and a treatment is very interesting.
Comment freely! Cheers, Chris