I had a GREAT meeting with Dr. Mohamed from Unicef on Friday. I'm really excited about that. He's pushing me to consider developing a malnutrition strategy beyond micronutrients. He wants me to consider taking on severe-moderate malnutrition for Pestel. This is a HUGE program. I started to think through this, and I gotta tell you: this is a huge effort. I really have to think this one out before getting into it, and I would appreciate your prayers and thoughts/insights/wisdom. The upside is that he is willing to commit resources toward it (he mentioned, for example, that if a specialty nutrition center needs to be built he would be build it). He would bring in the World Food Programme to assist with the Moderate-mild malnutrition part of it. I mentioned that I thought Heifer International could potentially become involved as well to provide support to the family with the goal of preventing the child from falling back into malnutrition state.
Also, I just received contact information about an organization that does well-drilling in Haiti. Just before that I read an excellent review article on the importance of water, sanitation and hygiene. The article mentioned the substantial impact on malnutrition that diarrhea has. Recurrent bouts of diarrhea actually worsen the child's immune system (making them MORE susceptible to the #1 cause of child death: Pneumonia), and worsen malnutrition (due to malabsorption, intestinal parasites, etc). Hopefully you can see how the cogs appear to be fitting together....
I worked on some of the data these past few days as well. 6% of children in Pestel are severely malnourished. 28-25% of children have some degree of malnutrition. All this data was collected last year.
Back to Unicef: Mohamed was very pleased with the approach toward Pestel. He introduced me to someone as a 'partner with Unicef', which is a very good thing. Unicef is in the business of promoting health/welfare of kids worldwide. They support efforts by organizations and governments (as opposed to running campaigns themselves or opening clinics themselves). I hope that this effort in Pestel will bolster their confidence.
We were able to obtain 20 SIM cards today. Phew! I had a challenging time finding them. Also, Anderson helped me figure out how to lock-down the 20 cell phones so that the workers cannot call their friends/family at will. That's also a huge relief because it wasn't clear to me how to monitor their usage of the cell phones (and those are the sorts of expenses that can rapidly get out of control).
Anderson is doing well, as is Nakeysha and her family. Her dad, Isai, is in Canada right now.
I head back to Haiti next weekend, and out to Pestel. Gonna be a busy busy busy week. There is a lot to do between now and Friday night. And then a lot to do in Pestel.
I am challenged with all the work, as you can imagine. And challenged with time away from my wife and kids. This has been an exhausting 6 months of constant activity. I am looking forward to a break in July.
As always, thanks for reading, praying, and encouraging!!
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