I started planning a nutritional recuperation program back at the end of October with two of my work partners. One of my work partners was supposed to scope out the malnourished babies during her normal 9 baby weighings that she does all over the community and in December, we would invite 50 malnourished kids with their mothers to a program that would recuperate them in January. I planned the program like this as kind of a test to see how I would do working with these two without the help of my supervisor because after she leaves to continue her education, I wouldn’t have that option anyway. Well, Gisele, the baby weighing woman, did not do her part at all and I originally cancelled the entire program because after all, if we don’t have any malnourished babies to recuperate, then it’s pretty impossible to continue with the program. I didn’t want all of Isidore (my other work partner) and my hard work to go to waste though, so I enlisted the help of my supervisor and we got the program back on track with a postponed date.
February 6th is when the program started. Each day, the women and their malnourished kids came at 9am (theoretically) to prepare the food (peeling potatoes, dicing fruit, grinding onions) together that we’d be using that day. Then we’d weigh all the babies and I would keep track on my form that I made how each one is doing each day to see if there are improvements, then we’d discuss what we were making that day and why it’s good for the baby and how much the ingredients are, and then right before the food finished cooking, we would teach them about something that is related to preventing their malnourished children from becoming malnourished again. The topic was different every day and they usually coincided with what we were already doing.
Overall, the program was a great success and the majority of babies gained weight, although not as much as I would have liked. The biggest problem that we had was that about half of the women took the program very seriously and came on time every day and participated during the cooking sessions and listened to the lesson and were active all week. The other have did not. They came late (sometimes by more than 2 hours), did not participate or seem to be following what was going on, and one women actually was force-feeding her baby right after we talked about force-feeding and why it’s bad. These women were just in it for the free meal and probably lived close by so they could walk and didn’t have to invest anything in attending the program. These women also didn’t seem to give their kids any other meal that day. It was obvious when each day their child was actually loosing more weight and most of them admitted that they weren’t feeding them breakfast or dinner.
This was incredibly frustrating for me because I really wanted to help them and definitely put a lot of effort into making the program happen, but it’s not possible to make the women care about their children and I can’t care double for their children in hopes that they would take it seriously. One woman who came from an hour away had a really malnourished child. He was a year and 4 months old but he didn’t look any older than 4 months. She couldn’t afford to come to the program every day and when I talked to my supervisor about her situation, she gave her a voucher to go to the hospital that specializes in malnourished children to recuperate her child for free. When I asked her if she was going to come back and take her baby to the hospital, she said she had to think about it because of the costs of coming back. I found out from my supervisor that a lot of women here do not get attached to their kids like we do in America and think of them as replaceable. They say, “Well, if this one dies, I’ll just have another one”.
I also had an issue with one of the mothers who, not only thought this way and didn’t seem to care about her child, but who thought it was funny to cause trouble in the program. She was one of the ones who lived nearby and came for the free meal and never helped out and every day she would ask me for money for herself to buy food or for an empty jar or for clothes. After a few days of this, on top of her having no respect for myself or the program, I took her to see Sakina, my supervisor, so that she could translate into local language that I was going to kick her out if she didn’t shape up. That seemed to help, but the last day of the program, a Saturday when all staff were gone, lightening struck twice. Her and another woman got into a blow-out fight because the other woman was feeding one of her kids who wasn’t malnourished and they were insulting each other. Then, when I was literally in the middle of my last lesson of the program, a grown man strolled into our area, interrupted me to tell me that he was hungry and to give him some food. I politely explained the program and that it was for 0-5 year olds, then he decided that it’d be funny to say that he was 4 ½ and also malnourished. When he wouldn’t leave, I started to get upset and basically threw him out of the area.
I’m glad I did the program and it definitely helped the children whose mother’s took it seriously, but I do not ever want to work with adults again. They are difficult! I am going to stick out the last bit of our contract working with kids in our clubs and camps and leave it at that. There is hope with the kids. It’s not too late to try behavior modification and to mold them to have better life habits, but I can’t say the same for the adults.
