a month in review: newborn health in Rwanda

It's hard to believe it's been one month since I got here....it flew by! Thank you for your prayers and support along the way; I have really appreciated your emails and notes of encouragement (and owe some of you a reply!!). I will try to catch up on my correspondence ASAP.

Until then, I wanted to give you an update on the work project here.

Did you know that the World Health Organization estimates that 10 million children under the age of 5 die every year from preventable causes? Things like pneumonia and malaria, even diarrhea, are killers of children in developing nations. It's hard to imagine something much worse than watching your own child die of something that should be simple to cure....

Of those 10 million children who die, nearly 40%, or 4 million, are less than one month old. Newborns the world over require specialized attention and care, and in developing nations, several factors combined inhibit the provision of such care. Sometimes it's ignorance, sometimes it's harmful but traditional cultural beliefs about newborn care, sometimes it's the lack of trained personnel to handle complications, and sometimes it's environmental factors, like little or no access to water. Oftentimes, it's a combination of all these factors.

My role here for the year is to explore the factors surrounding newborn health that are specific to Rwanda. While I am working with a pre-existing child survival program (run by three non-government organizations who are partnering together), I've spent the last month getting the lay of the land, not only learning where the child survival program has been working here and what they've been doing so far, but also meeting with other organizations in-country (like UNICEF) who are also working in newborn health, and attending meetings about child health at the Rwandan Ministry of Health.

After all these meetings and orientations, my role has been distilled and refined, and in collaboration with the Ministry of Health I will be conducting research over the next several months to explore the social and cultural norms surrounding newborn health here in Rwanda. I'll be trying to uncover why and how mothers and families and community health workers and health facility workers perceive and care for newborns in the ways that they do. Then, armed with that information, we'll be able to develop health messages specific to the Rwandan culture and environment regarding how to best care for newborn babies.

If you like pictures better (like me), here's a picture that the US Agency of International Development put together to describe the process of development in an international setting. My work can be placed in the second column over, the "product development" column, doing research as a basis for a future "product" (forming relevant health messages).

(Sorry, the picture is supposed to go here, but it can't load!! I'll work on it.)

I am really excited about doing the research because it means I get to go out into the villages and work with child survival program staff and interact with villagers. I will essentially be conducting trainings (in French, yikes!) for the staff and then overseeing collection and compilation of data. I am madly trying to fill in all the gaps in my French vocabulary (newborn health has a whole dictionary of its own terms, it seems...), and I appreciate your prayers for that! And I am continually thankful for your prayers for health (physical, spiritual, emotional, all)....what a blessing. :)

My prayer is that my focus in all of this work would be on the One Who purely loves and delights in all newborn babies, and Who (amazingly) knows Himself what it is to be born in very unfavorable conditions to parents with minimal resources.

Catch you again soon!