Back to Buhumbi

Yesterday was a successful day! (don't get philisophical and say well what defines successful...) Jan Micherhuizen and I went out early to the village of Buhumbi to present the information that we had gathered from interviewing individual mama's(about rainfall, harvest, types of food eaten in which months, sicknesses of kids in which months etc)about 2 weeks ago. I had made posters and we posted them on the wall at the clinic, where the mother's who are part of the health program come to wiegh their children. It was a weighing day so there were many mothers with babies- I'd say more than half were nursing- nursing is nothing to hide here...I am contemplating writing a descriptive paragraph about it, but just opted not to. I think my blogs go on for too long sometimes- well briefly there were breasts coming out of dresses from all directions. HA! okay. Also going on this day was a dental 'camp'- there are about 6 dentists in training from the UK doing a two day clinic in Buhumbi- so needless to say, there were ALOT of people at that clinic yesterday. So John, one of the community health volunteers went through each poster and added any changes that the women had to add (eg- 1996 there was more sickness than that chart shows). For the most part the charts stayed the same. There was discussion and interaction though, so this makes me feel like the information we have is as accurate as it can be for the methods we are using, and for what we need the info for.
Even though I can't understand much Kiswahili (and NO sakuma (the language they were using for the most part)), it was good to sit there amongst the people. Of course not all the mothers participated because of crying babies...but it was good nonetheless. I am impressed with this way of collecting information. It has been fast, and it is from the community- a well of knowledge.