Sembrando Infancia

This weekend I took a “field trip” out to work with one of CMMB’s more rural projects. Sembrando Infancia works to provide resources for mothers and children within about 300 families in an area called Cambio Puente, just outside of Chimbote (about 2 hours from Trujillo). An impoverished area, Cambio Puente has dirt/sand roads, no running water, and no electricity in many cases. Here, an outhouse is considered a luxury. Geographical distance and financial constraints are large barriers to receiving healthcare in this community. Thus, Sembrando Infancia goes to them. Every few months they conduct a “campaña” within the community, offering free visits with doctors, nurses and other health professionals. They move the location of the campaña each time in order to reach out to more residents.

They also offer regular health education – this time, they had a talk on how to prevent the tropical disease Dengue. Symptoms of Dengue include a fever, head/body aches, and a rash – and the disease can be life-threatening. Dengue is a disease transmitted through mosquitos – with no vaccine available, prevention measures are crucial.

Sembrando Infancia also attacks issues such as hygiene and sanitation – teaching important skills such as hand-washing and safe drinking water practices. For example, they taught residents of Cambio Puente the SODIS system, a method of water purification via ultraviolet rays, which involves hanging clear plastic bottles in the sun. They weigh the children and address issues related to malnutrition. In the last few months they’ve also performed large-scale screenings and treatment for problems such as intestinal parasites and anemia. My friend and fellow CMMB volunteer Cathleen Daly is spending a year working hard with this project and you can read about her work in her blog: http://cathleeninperu.blogspot.com/. (Cathleen, I hope I did you all justice with this short description!)

I had a great experience working with the team for the campaña. We set up a bed and some reed mats on the dirt entry-way of a residents’ home, where I conducted physical therapy assessments for the day. Most of my patients were children, and I saw everything from mild to severe hypotonia, cerebral palsy, hydrocephaly, torticollis, and clubfoot. All of the children were underweight and most had a history of labor complications. My observations continued to note the trend that here in Perú, developmental delays in motor milestones, particularly walking and crawling, are very common.

It was difficult to perform my assessments knowing that these families would not receive much follow-up, and of course a big part of the day revolved around education and practicing home exercises. A big challenge I’ve noticed here is that the families are very hesitant to do home exercises with their children – sometimes it’s the fact that there’s simply little time with job demands and trying to find the next meal. Other times, the cultural attitude seems to be very much a contentedness with dependence on receiving outside care. These parents/caregivers simply think that they don’t have what it takes to do it on their own, even when they are fully capable and we start with very basic exercises. Illiteracy is another complicating factor, but next time I plan on bringing some home exercise handouts that have pictures.

The campaña ended with a child-mom dance party, and each kid went home with bags of a nutrient-rich milk-and-oat beverage. All in all, this physical therapy experience was a great one, and the kids were adorable and a lot of fun to work with. I really enjoyed learning about the strategies and inner workings of a successful public health program.

I head back to Cambio Puente in May for their next campaña – where I hope to also do some home visits of the families I worked with this past weekend. I would say that the health disparities here certainly mirror what I’ve seen closer to “the city” in my own neighborhood of La Esperanza, but I had a great time getting out to “el campo” to learn about a new community and the incredible efforts of its’ leaders to empower the residents with health resources.