During the past three and a half months I’ve been doing more
than moping around over my broken computer.
For example I’ve been skiing, learning how to stay warm, celebrating American holidays, and learning
how to properly walk on ice! In reality
I’ve been doing “a lot!”
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| Mama Cow |
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| The Issyk-Kul crew celebrating Turkey day - photo cred. to Becca |
Back in early
October we began working on some hand washing lessons. We are done with putting those on for now but
they were a lot of fun. We were able to
reach about 250 students between two schools.
It is hard to assess the impact of these lessons, but I know they don’t
hurt. One day when my brother’s friend
was over at our house he told me that when his young daughter came home from
school she was counting bir, eke, ooch, turt, besh (1,2,3,4,5) and showing him
how to wash his hands! I’ll consider
that one very small success. We tend not
to think twice about washing our hands in America after the bathroom, before
eating, after touching animals etc.
However it is much more challenging here, this can be shown by the
incredibly high rates of Hep. A in my village and other diseases. In winter time the rates for all of these
diseases skyrocket. I don’t know the
reason why but I can speculate that for one it is cold. The cold itself isn’t making people sick, but
keeps people from taking preventive measures.
One example is washing hands.
Washing hands with cold water, when it is cold sucks, I know! I also know at my house we do not have
running water, and for quite sometime our sink was outside and every morning
the water in it would be frozen solid rendering it useless. I had hand sanitizer, so I used that instead
but I know my family doesn’t have hand sanitizer so I try not to think about
what they did after using the restroom. Our
sink is now inside thankfully. One other
major problem is a lack of resources and sometimes laziness. Our village school has 650 students and only
4 sinks, see the picture for what I mean by sink, and they sometimes have water
and I have never seen them have soap.
Soap is cheap, soap is readily available, but they don’t have it. So if a student uses the restroom all they
have to clean their hands with is cold water… No wonder we have a Hep. A rate
in our village that was more than 4 times higher the rate in the rest of my
region in 2012 and an average age of 9.
This is an area and a topic I look forward to doing more with,
potentially a running water project, along with getting our school director to
take the initiative to at least make sure the school has soap!!! This will be a
challenge, because she will gain no benefit from it, and they will make the
excuse that the students are bad and the soap will disappear. It is engrained in their culture to not take
the blame and responsibility for things; they even have a verb tense that aids
that!
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| 2 of our 4 sinks no soap :( |
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| Hand Washing is Fun! |
Along with trying to get the students to wash their hands
I’ve been working on some data collection.
I’ve been in the process of doing a need assessment and giving a basic
health questionnaire with topics relevant to Kg. We were able to get about 1.6% of our
population to complete the survey giving us a pretty decent sample size. This was half of my original goal but do to
time constraints, and lost surveys that was all I was able to achieve. I was amazed at how lazy or indifferent a
small portion of the population was when it came to filling out the
survey. The survey had 5 questions, the
first asks to identify what you believe are the 4 biggest health problems in
our village are, the second asks for the 4 best things in our village, the
third asks what you would do to improve the school, the fourth asks what you
would do to improve the hospital, and the last asks the same about the
village. I quickly learned I could not
give more than one survey out at a time because people would simply copy each
other’s answers or talk together and decide on the same answers. This is normal practice in schools even on
tests so I get where it is coming from.
All the English teacher volunteers hate this and struggle with it. I would even ask them to do it themselves because
we need to know what individuals think, but no hope. I am just about done with translating the
results and will post them here once done!
We just began administering the health test, much behind schedule after
waiting almost 2 months to get the translations back from our staff. I am very excited to get all the results
back, and begin planning lessons and knowing what areas to focus my time
on. I don’t mean to sound negative or
disappointed about the time it has taken or the results we have received, but
instead want to share that working in a very different culture and trying to
get things done on a schedule is very challenging for a large number of
reasons. Patience, I thought I had it, I
was wrong, but I am learning more and more everyday.
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| The Carrot, the Rabbit, and the Farmer at the Fall festival |
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| Veg art |
Those are my main things to show in 3 months, but we’ve been
doing much more. I’ve attended 3
conferences, one on HIV/AIDS, one on healthy families and we are beginning a
woman’s club in two weeks, and one on grant writing and project design. I also do twice weekly English lessons with a
group at the school and they are wonderful.
In exchange for my English teaching, I’m not very good at it. I have them help me with my health projects,
giving surveys, administering tests and more.
Along with work, I’ve also been playing.
We have the nicest ski resort in Kg about 3 hours from my village so
I’ve been there a few times, it’s not the best, but for Kg. it is amazing! Also about a third of the price as it would
cost to go in America. Work is picking
up, we are in the process of planning a summer health camp, I’m helping out
with a winter sports camp in a few weeks, and we are getting ready for new
volunteers in April.
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| The neighborhood hoodlums after our first decent snow |
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| Christian and I riding the lift |
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| Kara and Andrea's Halloween Party |
Next blog, India!
