End-of-March Update

Work has been pretty busy during the past two weeks. We’re starting a supplementary feeding program, which is only a very small part of the ongoing home-based care program for people living with HIV/AIDS and orphans and vulnerable children. We need to identify, refer, and follow-up with children aged 0-2 who are moderately or severely malnourished. In order to do this, we have to train the community caregivers (CCGs) on how to look for signs of malnutrition by identifying edema (swelling) in the feet and other parts of the body, measuring mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), and looking at other physical signs. Last week we trained the first group of CCGs here in Sembabule, and I think it went fairly well. Only health centers are allowed to actually treat malnutrition, through in-patient and out-patient care and by distributing ready-to-use therapeutic food, a peanut-based paste-like food that comes in a packet. So while our CCGs can’t actually treat malnutrition, they can identify people who need to go to health centers, follow-up with them after they return from the health center, and provide nutrition education and support. We still have to train the CCGs from other faith/community-based organizations (FCBOs) that we work with, so this process will be on-going for the next couple of months.

In a couple of weeks we have to submit a report to USAID about the number of clients we’ve served over the past six months. In order to do that, we need to have complete data from our F/CBOs with information about services provided to the clients in the communities. Ideally, the CCGs would be filling out their forms and submitting them back to the F/CBOs on a regular basis, but unfortunately this is far from what actually happens. Even when some of the forms do make it back to the F/CBO offices, they’re not always entered into their databases by the F/CBO staff on a timely basis. They do their best, but for several reasons, their databases are not up-to-date. So, we’ve been playing catch-up with the F/CBO data and helping them enter what forms they do have, and also stressing that they desperately need to get all completed forms back from the communities. This isn’t the most glamorous aspect of working on a development project like this, but it is extremely important and necessary that services given are documented – otherwise we have virtually no proof that our projects are actually doing what they’re supposed to do. This process will keep us (particularly Suzanne and I) very busy for the next couple of weeks.

A typical Saturday or Sunday here goes as follows: wake up a little later than usual (around 8:30 or 9), make instant coffee, try to go online if it’s working, start soaking some laundry, eat breakfast (bread and peanut butter, or muesli, or cereal, or eggs), read (currently reading: Atonement), watch some TV episodes (just finished Grey’s Anatomy season 2… for approximately the eighth time in my life), read, watch something else, try to go online again, rinse my laundry, do a yoga DVD, hang up my laundry, [possibly] shower, read, watch some more TV or a movie, eat a late lunch/early dinner, sometimes receive a phone call from my parents, listen to a podcast (Radiolab is my current favorite), go to sleep around 11. Fascinating, right? But I thought maybe you’d like to know what I do during my quiet weekends here.

I recently finished one of the best books I’ve read here: The Invisible Cure, by Helen Epstein. It’s a fascinating, easy-to-understand book about the AIDS epidemic in Africa and why fighting the disease has been so difficult. I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to understand why AIDS is so devastating in Africa and why western intervention hasn’t worked.

A few things I’ve been missing lately: nail polish, shorts, salads, my coffeemaker, Thursday night NBC shows, Minneapolis, and my besties.