First day of work!

Hi all,

On Thursday, I went to the CSCOM (health center in my village) to help with weekly baby weighing and vaccination day. Of course, and thank goodness, I didn’t give any of the actual vaccinations, but I did get to weigh each of the babies, record their weight and track them on the growth chart. This is something that we practiced during my training so I had some experience in it already. And it helped my Bambara because I was required to read off the baby’s weight in kilos and grams, in Bambara, to the vaccinator sitting across from me. It also helped because I was in charge of finding out the child d mother’s name and locating their chart in the large stack that we had accumulated.

When we track the baby’s weight, we use a chart that puts the child in one of three categories according to their weight and age. The categories are green, which is good and on track, yellow, which is underweight and malnourished, and red, which is severely underweight and severely malnourished. A child in the red is directed to speak to the doctor at the CSCOM immediately, while a child in the yellow is counseled by the matrone (like doctor and midwife in one) or vaccinator on proper nutrition and steps to improve the child’s health.
Many of the babies we weighed were either in the yellow or red, which seems alarming to me. One of the other health volunteers I talked to pointed out that while it is wet season and many families are spending their days farming in the fields, we are in between planting and harvesting, a time that is also labeled as hungry season.

The very positive thin is that the CSCOM was already hosting these vaccination and baby weighing days, which is a HUGE step in the right direction, one which they took on their own. This makes my job easier and harder in that at least the CSCOM is well set up and knows how to take initiative and is functioning at a highly positive level. The hard part for me now is that I have to figure out where I fit in and how I can be best of service. Many CSCOMs don’t already have these practices in place and so I would be helping to set them up. Now my real job begins in identifying where improvements can be made and figuring out what my community needs and wants from me.