**This blog was written a few weeks ago in the village**
This past week, I was back in America, kind of. Before you start writing the hate e-mails, I wasn’t actually in America or else I would have obviously called all of you prepping you for my arrival and all of the wonderful food we would eat and drink we would drink. However I was back in America in the sense that for the first time in 12 months, I had a schedule. I got up around 6:00 am, I went for a run (although it was through the African bush with little children chasing me), I took a shower (or bucket bath in the cold mornings looking up at the massive Zambian sky), I got dressed (in chitenge and tank top), made breakfast (used the leftover coals from heating my water to heat water to make oatmeal) and then went to work at 8:30(walked 5 minutes to my clinic) and came home around 16:30 (walked the 5 minutes back to my house), immediately got into my pajamas, listened to the news and went to bed (around 20:00/8:00 pm). So OK it wasn’t EXACTLY like America, but like I said, it was the closest I have gotten to being there in over a year.
Why did I have this unusual schedule when my normal one usually consists of one meeting a day and cleaning, cooking, and doing other chores the rest of the day? Because I finally held my NHC Training of Trainers!! So now you are probably asking, what the heck does that mean? It is a bit confusing but I will try to explain it in the easiest way possible. An NHC is a Neighborhood Health Committee. The rural health center, which I am connected with, contains a catchment area of 14 “zones” AKA collection of villages, each which has their own NHC. The job of an NHC is to give health education to the community, do small projects to raise money for a health post where the clinic comes once a month to give immunizations to children under 5 and be the general link between the village and the Rural Health Center. These NHC’s are crucial as they are only link between the village and any health education what so ever.
When I first got to my village in September of last year I started going around to visit all of these NHC’s and soon realized that although they were “formed” none of them were functioning. They didn’t know the jobs of an NHC and weren’t educated on any of the six health thrusts of Zambia (which include HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria, Reproductive Health, Nutrition, and Water and Sanitation.). These health thrusts are the top issues in Zambia’s health care system and what I was trained to teach about in the village. However this information wasn’t getting to the villagers through their NHC’s, which is why I decided to focus on it as my first big project.
Now it might sound crazy but I have basically been working towards this training since I got to my village. It took 3 months to just bike and visit all 14 of my zones during my community entry. Then I had to apply for a grant in order to get enough supplies, food, etc, to hold this training. Then I had to wait for the grant to come through and put a schedule together comprising of different facilitators throughout my RHC and the District Health Office who could come and help me to train. The way in which I decided to organize it was to have Training of Trainers where we picked two people from each zone to come to training for five days. They were trained on the six health thrusts of Zambia as well as exactly what an NHC is and why it is so important. After this five day training they are to go back to their zones and each train their own NHC. This is what is happening as we speak. Then over the next few weeks I will be traveling to each of the zones and checking to make sure the trainings actually happened, giving a post test to verify that the proper information was given and then give certificates of completion (which are a really big deal in Zambia). Whew. Did you stay with me throughout that?
Anyway, so the training went really well and I am thrilled that it did. Everyone showed up on time, they participated and seemed to be learning a lot. It was one of those moments where I truly appreciated Peace Corps and the work I am able to do here. Just watching them learn and really feeling like this would make a difference, even in a few peoples lives, was one of the most rewarding feelings I have had in Zambia. Also, this past weekend I hosted new volunteers in my village and decided to take them to one of the NHC trainings, which was happening. I want to preface this with the fact that I wasn’t planning on going to any of the trainings until the last day when they had worked out all of the kinks. However this was the first day and I was extremely nervous that they wouldn’t be prepared, or nobody would show up or the whole thing would be a bust. I was happily surprised. They were there, they were prepared and the training seemed to be going extremely well. I really did feel like a proud mother. I know not all of my NHC’s will be this great and after this not all of them will be as active as I want, but with everything here even if half end up being successful I will consider it a success.
I hope you all could keep up with that crazy explanation. It really is hard to explain what we do here sometimes. Either way you hopefully got a small idea of what I do here and why I love the work so much. It has officially been a year since I landed in Zambia and the amount I have learned about myself, my work and my village is amazing to me. I truly do learn something new everyday, as cliché as that sounds. So its one year down and one to go, I can’t wait to see what this next year brings.
P.S. the picture at the top of the post is the last day after we had finished the Training of Trainers. Felt like a proud bamaayo ( mother).
