Sunday and Monday were filled with visitors at CLI. Dr. Oden and Dr. RRK paid a visit to CLI on Sunday and we gave them a full run-through of the site with Jeff. Although the health center is not yet up and running, there are a lot of future projects in the works at CLI and potential for future Rice interns in medical and engineering-related fields. It’s always great to see familiar faces and their interest in the site gave me a renewed sense of lucky I am to be here experiencing the start of it all.
Monday was also a big day for visitors at Child Legacy. An emergency at St. Gabriel’s prevented Mr. Ngalande from visiting, but he did send two Msundwe area HSAs to visit the site. I’m not sure whether or not I’ve given a detailed description of who HSAs are what they do. HSA stands for Health Surveillance Assistant and they are essentially government-paid community outreach workers. They are not health professionals but they do undergo community health training. Their primary responsibilities are to provides vaccinations, report health updates and outbreaks to their respective health centers, and provide health education in the communities. Harold, one of the HSAs whom we met with, is the head HSA for the greater Msundwe area and was extremely knowledgeable about the program. At this time I am still unclear as to whether or not he is affiliated with the community outreach program run through St. Gabriel’s or whether he simply knows Alex (Mr. Ngalande).
After giving the HSAs a grand tour of the site and trying to make them feel as at home as possible at CLI, we explained to them a little bit about Jeff’s goal in adding a community health worker to his well repair team – improving health not only through increased access to water but also through treatment for common illnesses such as malaria and diarrhea. Jeff is hoping to emphasize the treatment of under fives, at least initially. While Harold was extremely willing to try to establish a relationship between the Msundwe-area HSAs and Child Legacy, he emphasized that their main role is serving their own communities through routine updates and monitoring. He also mentioned that most of the HSAs would not be interested in being gone for long periods of time. Jeff also informed us that the well repair team just headed up north to the Kasungu area so there may not be an opportunity to test out this partnership in the near future.
Sabha and I were extremely grateful for the opportunity to meet with Harold and his colleague (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten) and exchanged numbers for future contact. During our meeting with Alex on Friday, he informed us that HSAs could easily be trained to use the Rice CHO backpack, but at present their training is very limited and they may not be exactly what Jeff is looking for. A better solution may be to have the well-repair team coordinate with HSAs prior to their visit so that they can organize health talks at the well repairs and/or vaccinations. I really like the idea of combining the health care with the well repair missions, but it is a little more complicated than I had originally thought because the best health care and education cannot be achieved during a quick, one-time encounter. We will have to continue to brainstorm. Once the CLI health center is operational, it should be easier to incorporate HSAs or some other community health program.
Danielle, Alexa, and Issac (from Medic Mobile) also visited us in the afternoon. It was great to give Danielle and Alexa a tour of our intern placement since they were so gracious about sharing their experience at St. Gabriel’s with us. It was also very interesting to hear more about Medic Mobile, especially because I think it could be very beneficial to Child Legacy’s health center in the future.
It seems that now is quite the season for visitors – Z will be back in Namitete on Friday and I know that she is very interested in visiting CLI, the group of 13+ donors is coming in on Saturday, and then Michael arrives on Monday, July 4th. It is looking like we will have a very busy week installing the new solar panels, and 5 KW wind turbines, and otherwise preparing for the donors’ arrival.