Roughly translated: Zealous are the Health Educators who go by foot
October 25 - October 29 was Mother and Child week. This means getting Vitamin A, Deworming pills and the Measels vaccine out to every mother and child who needs it. The mayor and doctor brought in other docotrs/nurses/midwives from Fianar to come help go out to all the fokontany where the health educators gathered people to get medicine.
Posters were put up throughout the commune in the week before. Thursday notes were send out to the mpanentanas (health educators) to come to a meeting at the CSB II on Friday. Monday I accompanied a nurse and another worker from the hospital with a cooler for the vaccine, bottles of pills and capsules and seringes.
We went to 2 fokontany. One 5k away from the commune and the other 7k but they are on the same road that loops back around to the commune. There was a misunderstanding on the part of the mpanentanas and no one was gathered... So we walked back to the CSB and helped out there. Tuesday we went out again and this time there were people - a lot of people.
The first fokontany set up was pretty disorganized although it was the only time we all had charis and a table to work at. The Vitamin A came in these capsules that we had to cut to cut the top off of and squeeze into the kids mouths. This was my task - along with popping the the pill in there afterwards. Picture it - Me, who does not have the greatest soft spot for children, sticking my fingers in the mouths of about 400 kids between the ages of 9 months to 4 years old... many of whom were crying screaming, slobbering, snotting and just being plain out difficult... yeah... it was a shit show and we didn't have lunch or water between sometime before 7:30 AM and 6:00 PM when we got back from the second fokontany.
I must admit some kids were cute, like the ones who ran away when we jokied about giving them vaccines too. I did my tounge trick at one point and they loved the shit out of that - they always do. On Thursday we weont out again to just do vaccines for anyone who was missed. Instead of having one big group gathered like before, we went out to each individual tanana* and the mpanentanas pretty much made sure that each house came and got the kids vaccinated. Very, very cool! Anyway, even though the kids were screaming and crying over all the vaccine business they were cute and it was funny all at the same time, I guess because they were so dramatic about it.
Coolest thing about all this is that it was happening all over Madagascar!
*So I think I figured it out. The commune is the whole community, the biggest and also called the center of the community. Then the fokontany (10 in Sahambavy), is the small villages that are the surrounding subsets. The smallest is the tanana which are the little clusters of houses within the fokontany.
Haha I love that you described mother/child health week as a shit show. It was the same way in my town, pure chaos, constant screaming. At least they were pretty organized about it. My town had signs everywhere and already knew what the deal was. I'm having the same problem as you in that my CSB is actually really well established and there's nothing for me to do. Le sigh, what can you do? Give it time, I guess!
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