Malnutrition Eradication Campaign: Celebrating Children’s Day in India with RMF

As part of  the launch of our Malnutrition Eradication Fundraising Campaign, we have new blog from our team in India about our malnutrition education and treatment camp in India held in honor of Children’s Day last week.

Agasia Village, Jhabua District, Madhya Pradesh.

On November 14 every year India celebrates Children’s Day to honor Nehru’s Birthday.  This year RMF India mobilized our staff and the local community in Jhabua to pool together resources and bring medical treatment to women and children in one of our most remote villages, Agasia.

This camp was truly a community effort.  Our Community Nutrition Educators coordinated with the village leaders and anganwadi workers (village health workers) for a week before the camp to make sure that all the children and their mothers would turn up.  The sarpanch (village head) allowed us to use the local school building and provided us with tables, chairs, and water.  The anganwadi workers from Agasia and surrounding villages all came to the camp to show their support and to help out with weighing the children and counseling their parents.  In a region where anganwadi workers have a reputation for not working properly, we had 8 anganwadi workers who spent their entire day off helping us serve their community.  In addition to these local stakeholders, local staff members of the Madhya Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Program (MPRLP) also came out to show their support and help with logistics.

With all of this organized by RMF and the local community on the ground, the District Health Department offered to supply all the medicines and health staff for free.  Dr. Mayura, an energetic and passionate pediatrician from the district hospital, worked tirelessly throughout the day seeing all the children, without even stopping for lunch.  The District Malaria Officer was also present with malaria rapid tests and treatment ready for those who tested positive.

As a result of these generous partnerships, RMF’s Children’ s Health and Nutrition Camp screened over 500 children and their mothers and treated 171 children and 34 mothers.  That’s over 500 people who would have never received care without this intervention.  The majority of the pediatric patients presented with symptoms of malaria, pneumonia, and skin conditions.  The majority of the women treated were pregnant and anemic or suffering from UTIs and yeast infections.  All patients were given appropriate medications and counseled on their use and prevention of diseases in the future.  Five children were referred to Nutritional Rehabilitation Centers and one case of suspected congenital heart disease was referred to Indore.

RMF’s CNEs entertained the crowd with street plays and songs about nutrition while the mothers patiently waited with their children to see the doctor.

This will be the first of several Children’s Health and Nutrition camps RMF has planned over the next 2 months.  From our work in the field throughout our 500 villages we’ve identified pockets where communities, for a variety of reasons, do not access any health services.  For these communities, RMF will bring care and treatment to them, referring the most urgent cases to higher centers for care and offering counseling on nutrition and health to these communities as part of an integrated package or services.  By partnering with the District Health Departments and local communities these camps are not only highly effective in reaching a large number of children, but also cost effective.

For more information about RMF’s Malnutrition Eradication Program in India, click here.

We can use any financial help you are able to provide on this project to continue our Education, Treatment and Outreach and help towards our goal of Malnutrition Eradication in this region of India.

To contribute to this initiative, please visit our website at realmedicinefoundation.org.

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