teaching about diarrhea

In one of my older posts, I talked a lot about an amazing trip Maren and I got to take to “el campo” with PROSIM. Under the same umbrella of PROSIM is a different ministry of the Mennonite Church here in Cusco. Once every month a “health representative” from each of the 12 Mennonite churches in the Cusco region comes to the city of Cusco (for some this is the same 8 hr bus ride we took to go to their towns). These representatives receive basic health training in a lot of different areas, and then they go back to their communities and act as community health workers providing things like basic first aid, basic medicines, hygiene education, and nutrition education. It’s a way for the church in those areas to help other people in their communities.

At the most recent PROSIM health representative meeting, I got to give a lecture on DIARRHEA. It was pretty fun preparing for, and ultimately really fun to present, as I taught the lesson in Spanish. Since I don’t think the majority of my readership speaks Spanish, I am not going to share with you the entire lesson, but I am going to make one quick plug for diarrhea.

Did you know? 2 million kids die from diarrhea (dehydration) every year in this world. That’s the #2 cause of death in kids (18% of all deaths under 5 yrs old) and those 2 million deaths are more than HIV/AIDS +TB + Malaira + Measles COMBINDED cause in a single year. But, only 5% of global health aid money/research is focused on diarrhea.  And here is the really frustrating and sad thing: The treatment to stop these deaths costs about 40 cents to create. 40 cents!!!!! With 40 cents a mother in a remote village can create an Oral Rehydration Therapy consisting of water, sugar and salt. This simple concoction can effectively prevent the vast majority of these preventable deaths from diarrhea.  OK, done my rant.

It was really cool to see “public health” in action at this meeting with these workers. The other lessons for the day were about drowning and choking.

See below some fun pictures from our day of teaching the health representatives

Dr. Derek Brubraker (our main host here in Peru), teaching about drowning

me 

everyone learning the Heimlich maneuver, very funny

we had two volunteers make the Oral Rehydration Therapy , and then we all drank it, it was not tasty

close up, more practice for what to do when a person is choking