I'm working hard, I promise!

So after my post about going out and having fun, I thought I'd talk a little about what work I've been doing:)

As health volunteers, we have two goals. Briefly, our 1st goal is to work with mothers of children under 3 years old: we help them to adopt disease preventing practices, provide good nutrition, and promote growth and development. Our 2nd goal is to work with adolescents to promote safe sex practices, encourage future aspirations, and create PEPs (Peer educators) to inspire classes to come. During training we are only focussing on the first goal and assuming the skills we learn will help with the 2nd goal during our service.

Our main task during training is to find and work with one mom in our community during our 11 week training. This includes 5 house visits lasting 30minutes to an hour. Last week we found our moms and this week we need to have had our first session. I had mine today! The mom I'm working with is named Emelin (I mistakenly thought her name was Emily, but the n just tends to drop off) and her baby is 9 month old Micaela. My host mom is good friends with Emelin's husband. Emelin is so nice and Mica is adorable, I'm excited to spend time with them!

During this first home visit we are to assess the mother's knowledge of their "CRED card". In brief, this is a card that a nurse fills out to track the baby's growth and development. It is great for the parents to visualize how well their baby is growing. It's a very cool, comprehensive paper with tons of information. Our role was to make sure the mothers knew about all the features, what they all mean, wand why they're important. Luckily Emelin is very educated and knew everything. When we go to our permanent cites, the people aren't as well off as they are here, which may lead to less knowledge and more malnourished babies. That's when us being there to clarify and educate will really make a difference. For now, we are just practicing to get a feel of how home visits work as well as learning Spanish so that we can properly and effectively educate people.

I'm so happy and proud to be a health volunteer! I love that we are able to work with moms on a personal level and really tackle the health disparities in Peru on a grassroots level. We have incredible tech trainers who are teaching us all we need to know. Fortunately, thanks to nursing school, I feel pretty comfortable the subject matter. Now all I need is better Spanish skills to really get work done!