Nutrition Training at Magunga

Hello everyone! I'm still having a hate-hate relationship with my new smart phone. I thought I had the blogger app figured out, so I typed up a nice long post, added some pictures, and hit save. Ha, it is three days later and the status still says "saving". Now I'm on the clinic computer and that post is nowhere to be found. I guess I will not be counting on the Samsung to keep my blog up-to-date.

One of the nurses from the clinic giving a health talk in the village.

 So anyway, finally, post about some of the work I am doing over here. I have been working with the Peer Educators on the tea estate to help the folks in the labor villages improve their nutrition. I have found that people are not starving over here, but they are severely malnourished. The local diet is very starchy. They fill up on posho (corn flour and water) millet, potatoes, or rice. They love fried dough (chapatti, which is like a flour tortilla and mondazi, which is like a very dry doughnut). The adults and maybe the older children eat beans, which is good, but little else for protein. The ones with some money have chickens, but in the labor camps, that's really only the village leaders. 

What their diets are severely lacking are vegetables. This is caused by their culture as well as their lack of access to fresh produce. Culturally, they were not raised to eat many vegetables and they are not, for the most part, adventurous eaters (like me). They eat the same thing every day and are content. When I have tried to introduce one of the locals to something different, they don’t like it. I have heard many times that my style of preparing food is way too spicy. The village women will cook one onion and one tomato to “spice” ten cups of rice. Yes, the food is very bland and that is the way they like it. Greens like dodo (the local version of collards) grow like weeds. I have them all over my garden and trust me, I did not plant them. I have eaten them sautéed with garlic, onion, red pepper (or any combination of spices I am lucky enough to have received in care packages from the US), and olive oil, and they’re not bad. The locals eat them too, but not in the quantity that could improve their nutrition. Of course, they do not add in all the wonderful spices, so if a local offers me dodo, I know I will have to swallow it fast because it is bitter cooked alone.

The lack of vegetables in the diet here confuses me a bit, because we have market day every Friday and the locals have piles of tomatoes, onions, carrots, pumpkins, and eggplant for sale. All of this is sitting beside the potatoes, yams, cassava, and beans. There are lots of bananas, pineapples, mangos, and watermelon too. The market sells baskets of stinky dried fish and fly-covered meat too, but I won’t encourage the consumption of that stuff; it seriously turns my stomach! So, why are the farmers selling all of this stuff and not eating it? And who are they selling it too? Lack of access is obviously not what is causing the country-wide problem of malnutrition.

Of course, I do not have those answers to those questions and I am only dealing with workers living in the labor villages, which, I’m told, cannot afford to buy from the markets. They fill up on rice, flour, and oil bought at the company canteen. Therefore, here is where I come in (to save the day… hahah, not hardly) I have been working with the Peer Educators to give health lessons in the villages. To support our nutrition lessons, we are planting gardens so the workers can eat what they can grow, no need to go to the market. Great solution, huh? Eh, we’ll see. First we need to teach them why they should eat vegetables. Then we need to teach them to garden and how to protect what they grow from the free roaming chicken and goats, not to mention the baboons! Yeah, the novelty of having baboons in my back yard has worn off. They are scavengers. The village people throw rocks at them to keep them away. I’m told they eat everything, even baby chickens and during avocado season they make complete pigs of themselves!

So far we have planted kitchen gardens in two of the eight labor villages. The fist one has a few things ready to harvest; the second one we have just finished sowing the seeds. The true test will be what the gardens look like a year from now. The people need to take ownership of their own tiny plot and harvest their own seeds for future crops. The initial seeds were bought by the tea estate, but I know I cannot ask them to do that on a continuous basis. One of my challenges here is to make the actions I initiate sustainable. Whew, big challenge!

Here are a couple shots of a health talk in the Magunga labor village. We just set up class under a tree and people wonder in and listen. The Peer Educators are a tremendous help. I could do none of this work in the villages without them (the language barrier is just too much). In this lesson the three with capes are the food “super heroes, Go, Grow, and Glow”. This is not the way nutrition in the taught in the States, but here it is very simple. Go is a starch; your carbohydrates that give you “energy to run and play all day”. Grow is your proteins that make you “grow big and strong”. Glow foods are the fruits and vegetables that “make your eyes sparkle and your skin shine”. This is how they teach it. It’s cute and it’s easy and all we ask is that people eat at least one item from each food group every day. Then we go through all of the local foods and test them on which group they belong to.

Our Peer Educators giving a nutrition lesson.

Our Food Group Super Heroes.

Working Hard

Still trying to figure out my new phone so this is only a quick post with a picture to test the blogger app I was able to upload. Actually, I have done a few small projects this past month. .. it's not been all laying back in the sunshine, but there has been plenty of time to relax.