January 5, 2009 -
We all got in the bus today and drove to downtown Douala where we visited the Directors of the Littoral Province HIV and Malaria Prevention Programs, and then the Assistant to the Director of the Ministry of Health. These visits were to inform these officials of our plans and to receive their official permission to do the things that we've planned.
The students will distribute mosquito nets and do malaria prevention education while they are doing health history and assessments with villagers assigned to Women, Environment and Health (WEH). We'll accompany the HIV Program van and staff when they do HIV testing the last week the students are here.
We will spend some nights in a hotel in one of the villages which is central to many of the villages where our work will be.
This afternoon all of us - the 15 students, 3 faculty, Carol, Ruth, Joe, and I - boarded the Linfield bus and drove to downtown Douala to meet with officials to introduce them to the work we plan to do, answer their questions, and to receive their official permission to begin working in the villages where the 430 orphans live who are assigned to WEH. We met briefly with a) the Director of the Littoral Province Malaria Prevention Program, the Director of the Littoral Province HIV/AIDS Prevention Program, c) the Littoral Province Health Services Program Delegate, d) we stopped at one of the WEH offices where we picked up 3 WEH volunteers, and e) the last stop was to pick up about 100 mosquito nets at the site where they are impregnated with insect repellent. The bus was really full!
The officials were all gracious and quite interested in assuring that we were not going to turn out to be yet another group with empty promises and promoting our self-interests. We assured them that we would be doing health assessments and health education with WEH clients in compliance with governmental requirements. They were pleased to learn that because a nurse practitioner was present, we would be providing medical treatments for conditions that were discovered through the assessments. We were comforted to receive official permission to do the work that we had come to do in Cameroon.
Part of our mission will be to distribute mosquito nets, i.e., moustiquaire, to the WEH orphans and disadvantaged women who care for the orphans, and the students raised enough money to purchase about 250 nets and still have money to hire the Littoral Province HIV/AIDS Program to do some testing in 2-3 villages, thus we'll return to the Malaria Program office to buy more moustiquaire pretty soon. The students have written a malaria education pamphlet that they'll distribute with the nets. Part of their malaria education will be to teach school children to play Malaria Mosquito Tag - a moustiquaire is hung up or a big shady tree make a good substitute, then everyone stands in a circle, someone is the "Malaria Mosquito" who runs around the outside and tags someone in the circle, then the Malaria Mosquito chases the tagged person who tries to make it to safety under the mosquitaire. If Malaria Mosquito catches you, you'll catch malaria - just like in real life. The lesson is to avoid malaria by always sleeping under a moustiquaire because the anopheles mosquitoes are out and biting during the hours that children should be in bed for the night.
Joe has agreed to serve as our photographer. He took pictures as we drove through the busy streets, and he will be busily snapping away for the coming weeks.
Back at the Titi-Manyaka house - this will be base camp for all of us till the students leave in late January. The students didn't bring laptops and are eager to communicate with their families. The nearby internet cafe has iffy availability, so I've offered them the use of my laptop. I'm hoping to be able to write each morning before they arrive for breakfast - I'm pretty sure that it will be busy every evening that we're in town, and there won't be internet connection when we're out of Douala.
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