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As corn husks and cassava dry on the ground, many of our Nawantale children show the signs of malnutrition – bulging bellies. Drought and unpredictable rains mean we have small or meager harvests, often with little protein to add into our diet for those of us who rely solely on our gardens for food. Our babies suffer when we cannot raise the food or earn the money to feed ourselves. |
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This mother and child suffer from untreated malaria, which took five lives (three adults and two of our village children) in May 2008. Our poverty means lack of health care for many of us. When poor women are sick, families do not eat regularly. When poor women are sick, babies do not get bathed, and water is not always collected. |
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Traditional kitchens in our village are separate huts or houses used only for cooking on charcoal fires. We women sit to cook, breathing in the fumes and smoke of the fires which are not well-vented. If we use up our charcoal, we often burn waste which causes toxic fumes. |
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Maintenance of our wells is very expensive and each community tries to keep our wells working by pooling our money. But, broken wells like this one mean children and women walk far to carry heavy Jerycans of water back to our homes, yet it’s never enough to keep ourselves clean, hydrated, and prepared for droughts. |
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Trash and waste control are new concepts for us and we’ll need to work harder to keep our animals and trash separate. Although this trash heap is not in Nawantale, it shows we do not all understand the health dangers when our cattle eat plastic bags. We have not learned all the problems that can happen when human and animal wastes are not isolated or composted, but left out in the open, close to homes and village markets. |
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Our human waste is collected in pit latrines behind our homes and like these near our only primary school. These pit latrines are “full.” In July 2008, a diarrhea outbreak in the village renewed our community health mobilization about sanitation and hand washing with soap. Poverty like ours often means we don’t have washing water, soap or access to either near our latrines. We recognize that we have to make sanitation a priority because it will keep our health problems much more under control. You can see a washing station near the latrines, but it has no water, no soap and no maintenance due to lack of resources and the current drought. |
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If we have the money, we send our children to the only government Primary School in Nawantale. There isn’t money to feed our children at school during the day. We try to provide food, but our resources are very meager. There are few schoolbooks, little or no paper and pencils, and educational games don’t exist here. Our children learn songs to remember important ideas, especially about HIV AIDS and other illnesses. The children help to educate us, their parents, because so many of us never went beyond 7th grade. Nawantale has no high school. |
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Many of our elders need prescription glasses, but these would be a luxury item for us. |
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Our village has never had HIV AIDS screening, even though we have had many educational sensitization assemblies. We do not know who among us is infected, but we know AIDS is here! |
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Drinking water for some of us means catching a little rain runoff in clay pots during a storm. Although we have learned the reasons to boil this water, we often don’t. |
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Deforestation is a new concept for us, but we can see that we have cut down too many trees in order to grow maize. Soil erosion and water run-off during heavy rains and floods often destroy entire fields and we are left with no food harvest and no food storage. We do not use animal labor to till our fields, and few of us can buy fertilizer to rebuild the soil that remains after floods. |
