Thursday was a day full of activity, as Ryan and I started our day off with an early morning, hilly run through Ndera. We were greeted (and stared at) by many locals trekking to work, getting water, or ushering children to school. We were also covered head to toe in dust, as there is a company moving a lot of dust throughout Ndera...as they drive by, dust is kicked up from the road and the wind blows dust from the back of the truck everywhere.
Once we cleaned up and began our workday, we met with the Communications Team, Danielle and Lucie, who had been working on pieces in Musanze earlier in the week. It was a very in depth meeting, as we were able to discuss what exactly we would be doing here (finally). Soooo *drumroll* we will be writing an Early Childhood Development Curriculum to be used by the ECD Mamas (women who care for the children while the mamas are receiving their health and agriculture trainings), and creating fundraising campaigns for the ECD curriculum and One Pot One Hour training for Community Health workers. More information about our projects follows:
- ECD Curriculum
- Currently there are 22 trainings, 14 health and 7 agriculture, each take place for 2 hours in which the children are dropped off to be taken care of by 2 women who have already been trained by GHI during previous seasons. There, the children eat breakfast (fortified porridge), and these two ECD mamas watch and play with them until the training is finished. This allows for an optimal intervention in ECD, because the children attending with their mothers are 0-5 years old. By creating a curriculum for the ECD mamas to use, the children will be stimulated with song, poems, toys, and will have (ideally) learned some numbers and letters before attending primary school. Most children receive little stimulation before attending primary school due to lack of knowledge and resources. This disallows cognitive development imperative to positive performance in later school work. By teaching these ECD mamas, they will not only be able to help foster that positive growth, but teach the mamas how to foster that same growth in their homes.
- ECD Fundraiser
- Fortunately, GHI has received some funding for ECD in the past that has allowed for the ECD mamas, fortified porridge, and minimal training for the ECD mamas. This is not enough to make a big impact though. We will be fundraising during 'back-to-school' season in the states. Money from this fundraiser will go to training the ECD mamas in the more in depth curriculum we create and will go to purchasing books, toys, and other teaching/training material that can be used on-site. Currently, each health center has only 3 toys to be shared by 40-50 children. Ideally, many of these toys will be household items, or items easily attainable in resource poor households, so that mothers can replicate activities in their homes or in their gardens. This fundraiser will take place on the GHI website and on various forms of social media like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
- One Pot One Hour Fundraiser
- One Pot One Hour is a lesson taught to all mamas about how to prepare a delicious and nutritious meal in 1 pot in 1 hour. We can speak from experience that cooking dinner is quite an ordeal here...usually taking 2.5-3 hours. Many mamas spend a significant portion of their day cooking. This training teaches the mamas how to cut down their time in the kitchen, allowing them more time to work in their gardens, play with their children, and attend to other household chores, go to church, spend time with friends, and the list goes on. Many mamas have said this training has been the most valuable and life-changing for them. Unfortunately, only 40 women are trained per health center, per district, per season. While this is a large number of women trained, it does not come close to all of the women in the entire country of Rwanda or even all of the women in the districts GHI works in. To expand their reach and share such valuable knowledge, GHI has partnered with Community Health workers throughout Rwanda, training them in One Pot One Hour, allowing them to share the information with women in the communities they work in. There are currently 45,000 CHWs in Rwanda, though the number is growing as more and more are trained. Rwanda has pledged to have 3 CHWs per village, essentially 1 CHW per 50-100 people. To give an idea as to how many CHWs this totals, if there at minimum is 1 CHW per 100 people and Rwanda has a population of 11.78 million, there would be 117,800 CHWs in the country. GHI has taught 5,000 CHWs in One Pot One Hour with surplus budget, but with extra funding, GHI can train many more, rather than relying on leftover funding.
This is what we'll be up to for the rest of our time here, with an additional 2 blog posts we are writing for the GHI website!
We spend Friday diving into the ECD Curriculum development and began research for 1 of our 2 blog posts, which will be about amaranth. Amaranth is a crop native to Rwanda (as well as many countries in Central and South America). In plant form, it is highly nutritious; the leaves are cooked to form a spinach-like dish called dodo. However, you can also grind it into high protein, vitamin-rich grain and flour used in just about everything Americans use wheat flour for. We'll post a link to the blog on the GHI website once we finish it, but basically everyone in Rwanda loves and uses amaranth, so we want to feature it!
We'll be posting later about our adventures during our first weekend here!
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