Global Youth Service Day -Uganda

Malaria Day

Left-over work from my day-job and coordinating efforts for the GYSD have seemed to keep my nights very busy over the past two days -leaving me no time to blog since last Tuesday. Once again I’ll mention it here, except by God, I do not know how I seem to keep on top of the many duties and responsibilities that I am tasked with each day. When (some) people doubt the existance of God, I shudder to think of how myopic and daring such thinking really is!

Twelve hours ago now, I received a phone call from Milly. Milly is one of the youth participating in the service project at Muzinda. She is also the group’s elected mobiliser. Before we started on this service project, her ‘mother’ was quite apprehensive about her ‘daughter’s’ ability to even speak in public. “Milly is a very shy girl… I don’t know if she will even do anything (in the service project) “, Betty confided in me. When Milly called me, she was updating me on progress of the door-to-door malaria campaign that they have been carrying out all week since last Tuesday. From the excited voices in the background, I could tell that there were at least 5 or so other members of the same group with her as she made the phone call. To confirm this, I asked about individual members’ progress and there and then, I got spot-on responses. Some of the answers were being shouted out, I could hear by other people in the background. My earlier guess was wrong. There could have been more than 10 other people there with her! It was heart-warming hearing them all give responses and also the feel of excitement as they did -obvious proof that they were really enjoying implementing the service project. We had spoken for about 3 minutes and had only barely finished when Milly said her goodbyes. I knew it had to be the money that they were paying for the phone-call and then almost placed a call back to them but stopped when I realised that what had just occured was also an important learning lesson. Budgeting. Since we had committed to calling each party at different times, they would have to call me again in the morning as well, I am sure they were implementing a very good practice by limiting the amount of time that they spent on the calls. And after all, the important information had been passed on. Milly was quite eloquent herself while we spoke on the phone. I’m sure she has been more than hardworking during this past week. Clearly, her ‘mother’ shall be impressed this Sunday!

We’ve had a few challenges preparing for the culmination event on Sunday – some many last minute items that we needed to consider- but I’m sure it isn’t anything that cannot be sorted out. A couple of my colleagues are already becoming very (and I emphasise the ‘very’) nervous about the preparations and not quite amused at how ‘simply’ I am taking it myself. Like the cliche goes, “beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”; for the most part of the past 3 weeks now, I have been having very busy nights as I work my way towards a successful GYSD event. For the past 2 days, I haven’t had any sleep at all. I just finished with the media release a few minutes ago and in a another minute, it shall be halfway around the world -isn’t the Internet such a powerful tool? As well, I have reading Uganda’s strategic paper on malaria control -a 54 page document written by the malaria control programme of the ministry of Health. There have been quite a few segments that have really caught my eye, and I would like to quote some here:

“All people living in Uganda are at risk of being infected with malaria parasites and suffering attacks of malaria…”; “The malaria problem is made difficult by many factors. These include the increasing resistance of malaria parasites to chloroquine and sulphadoxinepyrimethamine which leads to treatment failures; climatic changes which lead to epidemics, weak health systems with poor access to health care facilities, and poor access to knowledge about appropriate health behaviour in the population, which leads to delay in treatment or wrong treatment.”; and this one, “However, knowledge on recognition of disease [in Uganda], which is critical in case management, was still very low. Only 34% linked fever to malaria, 18% associated malaria with cold, 14.5% associated malaria with headaches, 11.7% mentioned joint pains, and 10.6% body weakness. Malaria was mainly considered a problem of children (75%).”

Today is international malaria day. The service project that we are implementing at Muzinda through GYSD is also our effort to realise Millenium Development Goal (MDG) number 6. That international malaria day falls today, during our service week, is a blessing of God, I would consider, since it comes quite critically amid the peak of the children’s and youth’s efforts to create public awareness on malaria through service. Quoting our press release, “PEDN… following a special focus group which identified malaria as their primary cause for concern, the youth in this village have created a club designed to lead educational campaigns to better inform residents of the harmful causes of the disease. For two hours every Saturday and Sunday leading up to Global Youth Service Day the youth have been working with their local municipality officials and trained health workers to teach both younger children and residents at large about preventative measures that can be exercised to keep the deadly disease at bay, as part of their youth service project. This Saturday, April 26th 2008 and during Sunday, April 27th 2008 morning, the same group of youth shall be involved in clean-up exercises around the village in which they shall clear overgrown bushes, drainages, and boreholes on the village; construct bathrooms (using locally available materials) and also spray households for mosquitoes. All of these activities are intended to make the village safer from malaria cause, and by extension reduce the cases of school absenteeism due to malaria illness.”

Today is gonna be another busy one. I shall be back here to update again soon!