By Catherine Munyancho; Elke Kroeger-Radcliffe | Project Leader; Director
One month has gone by since, to our very great joy, the target sum of our crowd funding appeal was reached – thanks a million to all who helped us reach the goal. This allows us to start helping the malnourished ‘littlies’ in several villages to develop well. Alas, we have not been able to send a personal thank you to all our donors, but we hope to keep you up to date with our progress.
The village headmen in our management committee were asked to collect weight by age record cards for the under-fives from the village women. This started slowly– this is Africa – but has become unstoppable, even though we have already reached our target of 200 malnourished children. Our interns have worked on the questionnaire to be taken to the families when handing out the food supplement and discussed the pitfalls. This is not always simple e.g. when asking ‘what food did the child eat yesterday’. Here the term ‘for the maize pap (nsima), which only provides starch, but no vitamins nor minerals and very little protein.
Our ‘Vitagoat’ building was upgraded to meet the standards of the health authorities. We made the first official batch of ONENEPA for the project. This produced one week’s supply for 30 children, so we will need 27 more sessions to cover 4 weeks for 200 children. The ingredients are bought from South African shops in Chipata. We will also buy two pairs of scales so that the weights of the children can be checked. We had hoped to borrow scales from the Department of Health, but alas their clinics only have one pair which cannot be spared. More supplies will be bought in Chipata on Thursday. We always hope they will be available. Another problem is that we must not overload the taxi as there are many road blocks and policemen will find that we are doing the wrong thing by overloading goods and try to get some money from us for their dinner.
Very soon we hope to either upgrade the existing project or start a new one. You may be aware that the population of Katete is very traditional, so any change in behavior, which in our case includes giving more meals to the babies from 6 months onwards, is not only difficult to achieve, but poses real practical problems in the villages. Normally all food is eaten atone meal so there is no need to protect food from all sorts of creatures and/or kept cool. We are working on that one.
For now, with deep gratitude and very best wishes,
Elke and the interns and the whole crew of Tiko
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