the more you know...

Here are some photos of the February Village Health Worker workshops. Each village in my district has a village health worker (nasi ni koro = nurse of the village). The first Tuesday of every month we are meeting in a different village to do basic first aid training and to give them guidance on creating an action plan to improve the health of their villages. Some villages need to focus on environmental health and trash disposal. Some villages need to focus on clean, safe water. Each village has unique needs and different resources so each action plan will be different.

It's crucial that the nasinikoro have a support network in me and Lo, but also between each other. They work alone in their villages and often feel the work is stressful or they aren't capable of making good decisions about what to do in what situation. Lo and I hope to change that.

In Feb, we explained the role of the nasinikoro and how important it is. These women were chosen by their communities to be the first person on the scene in any case of injury or sickness in the village. We have one nurse for the whole district and she's a half an hour bus ride away for some of the villages. If they come on the 6 or 7 am morning buses, they can't return home until the evening buses at around 530 or 630 pm. Plus bus fare is a problem. For this reason, it is so important for the nasinikoro to be educated on how to tend to wounds and minor ailments.

So we taught (and learned) about burns, cuts (deep and shallow), fevers (adult and infant), head injuries, nose bleeds, etc. The women learned how to use a thermometer, count respirations, and take the pulse of their 'patient'. They also practiced cleaning and dressing wounds. To close wounds, we use a butterfly dressing, which you can see one of the women cutting the medical tape into the right pattern to stretch over a wound to close it.

Next month we will probably focus on non-communicable diseases (NCD's like diabetes, cancer, heart disease) and diseases like dengue and typhoid. Lo, my counterpart and co-facilitator and the nurse of the district, and I have not discussed what the topics will be, but we'll be working on that either this week or next and preparing the activities and such. We'd also like to start making the action plans for each village or at least identify more specifically the problems in each village so that we can make more informed action plans. So that by the end of March, the villagers will have started on health improvement programs in each village.