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I spent this morning at KOP first with Gladys and Paris of the mother to child program. They also help with family planning to try to prevent women from having more children than they are able to feed. We visited Mama Geri's daughter's baby who was just born! Mama Geri is someone I met the first day out on the field and Geri is her teenage daughter. We also took mama Geri to start a business a couple weeks ago so it was nice to see they were doing well.
Then we had plans to go out to the children's home who are badly affected by jiggers (Alex's family). You are supposed to treat each child's foot every day for two weeks but we can't get out there that often as it is far and takes too much time. This time we took enough supplies to leave with the mother so she could treat the children herself, now that she has seen us do it.
We got there and the feet of the children looked much better, even after only a couple treatments! The spots where the jigger was still in their foot turned black because they died and looked less swollen. It also seemed like their mother is putting more effort into keeping the house and the children clean. We found laundry outside and she washed each of her children when they got home from school. I'm not sure where their father is, we haven't seen him yet and we are told he is usually out drunk somewhere. He has his own room that is locked all the time and the mother and 4 children all sleep in the other room on a wooden bed frame with no mattress. However, it seems like the family is much happier this time!
I put directions on how to treat their feet with pictures on a sheet of paper for the children to read and they understood it and enjoyed reading it. We are going back in Friday to check on them again. I hope they keep up with treating their feet!
I had to laugh so hard. Alex, the older boy, was in the house which really has almost nothing in it and he was stripped down because they all washed themselves. All of a sudden he pulls out a fish from I have no idea where! It was a pretty good size and he was waving it around like a toy and making it swim in the air. I haven't seen any rivers or anything around so I have no idea where he got it but it was so random.
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