Health Education

Today we've been out to the Gulele Village and had a meeting with the women from that village who are members of a local group of the Womens Health Association of Ethiopia. We went there with our friend Birikit and her college Ababa who is a nurse. It was so nice to get to the outskirts of Addis, the air was so fresh. We drove for about 15 minutes, and then got out and walked on a path though the woods for about 15 minutes. It was strange how different it was from the city, being that close. All the houses seemed to be made out of cow dung, and there was tons of them living in each house. We visited a couple of houses, and in one there was 7 families living (each family having about 5 kids). Each family had a tiny room where everyone slept, most of the time in one bed. We also saw men making shawls inside one of the houses. There were kids running around everywhere, some with flies all over their faces.

When we got there the women were all gathered outside, many of them bringing their youngest children. They started making coffee for everyone, which took a while cause they did it from scratch, and then I really mean scratch. First they washed the coffee beans for a while, then toasted them over a fire, then ground them up by pounding on them with a stick. Then at last they boiled the coffe, and added an enormous amount of sugar ;) I'm glad they only serve it in tiny cups! We also got some snacks, which is typical for Ethiopia, can't remember what its called, but its a kind of seed that tastes a bit like unpopped popcorn. Pretty yummy.

While all the coffee making was going on we did some health education about basic hygiene. We would talk and Birikit translated. They would ask questions and interacted a lot with us during the teaching, and asked about particular health problems they were having. I talked about the importance of keeping the hands clean, how to clean them well and when it was most important to clean them. And then we did a demonstration of how not to clean hands and how to clean hands well, and they had to guess which was the right way, which they did :) The others continued on talking about cleaning the body, the house and some more specific information about children under 5.

After the meeting we were able to visit a couple of houses and see how they live. We also brought a lot of the knitted baby things and the baby clothes we brought and handed them out. They were very happy about it, and some even tried to hide what they had gotten so they could have some more ,) It was funny to see how all of them managed to put the hats on the wrong way! We are going back on Wednesday to do some more teaching about family planning, which is what they said they would be very interested in knowing more about. We will also buy and bring a lot of soap and sanitary pads for them.