And Now for a bit of the Techincal Health Stuff

We were asked to conduct some interviews with friends of our host mothers. The topic was health, the interview was 5 pages of questions long, which took about 20 minutes each. The results were fascinating.

It’s interesting the way wealth can be described here. Imagine, in you will, what separates a rich bathroom from a less impressive looking bathroom in the US. Here, as you might expect, the difference is quite different. A nice bathroom here will have a least a trickle of water coming out of a faucet, preferably in a sink, it will have toilet paper, a flush for the toilet, and my favorite, a toilet seat. A door is not required. (A really nice bathroom would also have soap and something to dry ones hand with.) A not so nice bathroom will have a toilet that can be flushed with a bucket of water, no sink, and no soap or anything to dry your hands with, no toilet paper or seat. And a typical bathroom in the places where we will be placed is actually a latrine, with a large, deep (hopefully) hole, hopefully with a cement block a little bit off of the ground to sit on. For hand washing we’re going to turn gallon jugs upside down in a net, then unscrew the lid to release a small trickle of water. It’s an ingenious thing that someone in Peace Corps developed for us to teach our communities, and without it, most people in the fields probably wouldn’t wash their hands after using the latrine or before coming in the house. I look forward to sharing that little idea with my community.

Of the 5 women I interviewed they all had working toilets, cement floors, cement walls and a tin roof. Those things make for a very nice home here. (The home I’m living in also has a toilet, cement floors and a tin roof. The walls are a mixture of tin and wood.) I would expect that with these fine furnishings (which are rare) they’d be among the more educated and perhaps have more of the correct answers to my questions. When compared to my fellow trainees, however, some of whom live in a community much worse off than the one I’m in, the level of education on these health topics is pretty much the same. For the most part, people don’t know the difference between HIV and AIDS and all of the women I interviewed believed that it can be shared by using the same razor. They can’t really name any STIs or too many forms of birth control. They don’t really know what a nutritious meal consists of. They believe baby formula is better for a baby than breast milk. And of the women I interviewed, all had had their tubes tied during their last births which were all C-sections. Many did not know why they’d had the C-section. Also, of the 5 women I questioned, 3 had lost a fetus or baby during the pregnancy or birth and didn’t know the reason why. Of 18 pregnancies among them, only 12 children are living today.

I have got my work cut out for me. Chances are the project site I will end up in will have less of the answers to these questions, but to be sure, Peace Corps asks that we interview about 100 women in our community. That is my job for the first 3 months of service. When I am done, in February, I will present my findings to the fellow health volunteers, and our leaders and trainers. I will define what I would like to work on, then get to it. After a year I will rejoin the group, revaluate my project, and make changes to help foster more growth for the second year.