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Samburu is a clbadic example of "undeveloped nature", the creation of God wanting many tourists to pay colossal sums to visit: villages defined only by hills; gazelles curiously looking at pbading vehicles.
I spent five days in the community, in the places where they went to get water, slept and looked for food.
From one point of privilege – driving from one village to another and spending a day or a few hours on a farm before moving on to another – I was wondering how amazing it would be to be like this in nature; stand a few feet and say, "Oh look, it's a herd of elephants walking down the river with their new calf."
To ask whether the zebras in sight are those which are normal or the almost extinct type of Grévy; to back away from the idea that a hyena can hide in the background, because I can see antelopes and dik-diks; their food.
However, on the third day, this beauty was the source of their death and their pain. This reflected the steps they had to take to catch up with the rest of Kenya.
A TREK FOR JABS
Watching Norparaku, in his thirties, in Marmarai, Samburu County, attaches his baby and evokes emotions of sweetness. The baby smiles at him and laughs as he is placed in the shawl, oblivious to the long journey his mother is about to make to support him.
She is about to walk for an hour on ruthless ground after taking the baby to be vaccinated in a local camp organized by a non-governmental organization, Action Against Hunger, with the Department of Health County.
She tells the Sunday Nation that she does not mind the one hour drive from her village of Lekea.
"Under normal circumstances, I would have walked all day in Suari or eight hours more in Ngilai to look for a health center, spend the night there and get up the next day to go home," she says. .
All the while, she and the baby she was wearing depended on the only food she wore until she returned home.
At six months old, her baby did not receive a single vaccine. According to the recommendations of the World Health Organization, a baby should have already been vaccinated against tuberculosis with BCG and receive some polio vaccine.
Here at the Marmarai Health Center in East Samburu, the nearest health center is the Wamba Health Center, located about 74 km away.
She would not normally visit Wamba for security reasons: there is a seasonal river called Lengusaka that "transported" people with her when it rains briefly.
Then there are more elephants on the road. Yes, elephants.
She, like the 56% of women in this country who were registered in the Kenya Health and Demographic Survey in 2014, can not read or write. But even with her attenuated knowledge of health problems, she knows that her child needs these bites.
Today, she must take advantage of the opportunity now that nurses are here.
"I've also come for whatever they can offer me until next time," she told Lifestyle.
TREATMENT BY ALL MEANS
Norparaku and other women have learned to trust herbs. Sometimes I learned that a headache would be alleviated by cutting off the head to drain the blood. Sometimes it works but sometimes, in most cases, children die.
During this exercise, nurse Teobalda Michael and a volunteer nutritionist do what they can and recommend, or even take with them, cases that require more than what the "hospital" improvised can offer. Teobalda is worried; she is almost short of antibiotics for respiratory tract infections that affect two people (58%), according to data from the National Health Information System. She can trace a straight line of pneumonia to the poorly ventilated houses where the Samburu live and dust.
"I am happy today that I have not seen severe pneumonia or advanced tuberculosis where the lungs are about to collapse," she said.
Women and men sit and listen while she talks to them about basic health stuffs but essential for survival, such as the need to drink water, d & # 39; use the toilet, get vaccinated and feed the baby.
It will also provide family planning services, iron supplementation and food for pregnant and lactating women. The community has so much trust in her nurses, like Teobalda, that she calls him whenever she is around to give birth to mothers who are lucky to have children.
Malnutrition is the challenge on which all other health problems of this county lie, where the bodies are so destitute that they could not fight a simple disease. This was the case in almost every household that Sunday Nation had visited in four separate villages.
According to an annual SMART Survey on health indicators in arid and semi-arid counties, global acute malnutrition in Samburu is 18%, nearly four times the acceptable 5%.
One in 10 children (10%) is severely delayed. This is only one number until the volunteer nutritionist Mourine Njeri states that food is needed for 1,000 days for a child, among other things, as the brain develops and its Immunity develops to fight diseases.
"After 1,000 days, you can not repair the damage," she says.
You do not have to be a medical graduate to say that most children sitting in the camp are malnourished. They are too small for their age – in short, the skin is scaly and they are not jovial. Food is hard to find, given the drought that has become commonplace in the county.
The mother was probably hungry throughout the pregnancy and, at the birth of the child, she could not badfeed and the baby had no food.
Mothers do what they can, including diluting the milk with water to feed their children. When they come to nearby camps, they find nutritional supplements, the benefits of which are reversed when children drink dirty water and suffer the stomach complications that accompany them.
But in the midst of all this gloom and fright, the one year old baby, Barunye, stands out like a sore thumb. Strangely, he is overweight. Her mother, just 16, attributes this to her older co-wives who helped raise the boy with camel's milk.
EFFORTS TO SAVE THE SAMBURU CHILD
Community health volunteers like Simaloi Leteren are an integral part of the health system in this country, but even with well-intentioned care, they can not substitute for the skill needed to lift the baby out of death caused by hunger.
At the Wamba health center, Mourine receives children suffering from severe malnutrition referred by Teobalda during local drills who are dying of hunger. They must be hospitalized in case of emergency. Like Asha's child – whose system was so hungry, he first received the F75, a nutritional prescription designed to strengthen the body to support blood circulation, breathing and even breathing. react to drugs.
At six months, the baby weighs only two kilograms. Mourine would follow the baby as a project, weigh and record even the hour, before switching to F100 and PlumpyNut, another nutritional supplement, once the baby stabilized. There are pictures of the Leinaisho twins who have seen remarkable improvement, ranging from frightful babies to happy toddlers.
This is additional work, aside from pregnant mothers and nursing mothers who need to be monitored for iron supplements, diabetes, HIV; hypertensive patients that she must see. The county has only 13 employed nutritionists.
Bernadette Lorunguiya, the nurse in charge of the Wamba 3 health center and organizing activities such as the one Norparaku came to, was fed up with children and "undead" mothers who have the heart beating but do not survive even though she and her colleagues gave everything to save them.
She told the Sunday Nation: "The person referred here is a person who walks for those many hours at the hospital and asks for the ambulance.We then drive to the patient.If they did not die at when they arrive, they die after being driven on rough and uneven roads when they are seriously ill. "
Even with the four-wheel drive vehicle, Bernadette takes about five hours to reach areas such as Ndonyonasipa, Gilati, Serolipi and Pareu.
MORE DISORDERS FOR RESIDENTS
Apart from the distance, there is no network coverage in the area. There are stories about the hours of work of the caregivers in the above-mentioned areas, sending a message and paying up to 1,500 shillings to the motorcyclist in no particular direction, "walking" with the message up to that point. They "collide" with the network.
Then they would call their family members before paying the same amount so they could go back. It's the same way that they make medical referrals. Obviously, the results are not satisfactory.
When they do not walk to get to health facilities, women like Mercy Lesan, 29, of Nkoteyia, are looking for water. Laborious does not even begin to describe the trip from his village Legama to Lisiang, where they go to fetch water. The trip starts at 5 am and lasts between three and four hours.
It takes more tact and finesse to navigate the field as the river approaches. The road is steep, winding with shrubs and sharp stones. To go down, you must be careful not to slip. climbing needs strength to fight gravity. Unfortunately, animals are often at the river before them.
Under the hot sun and the cooked ground, elephants, monkeys, cattle, zebras and gazelles did more than drink: they bathed, pissed and defecated in the water. This, according to Mercy and her friends, is better than the water from the next water source (Wigama), which has become green and smelly; even the animals would not drink it.
Without any other alternative, they go for water, knowing too well that it would hurt them. The fact that there is a narrower borehole that has not been repaired shows that poor countries like Samburu are fighting against the social aspect of development management, which should dictate which interventions should be prioritized over the others, whether the allocation of funds should take into account the challenges to be met. the county a.
After many children reported to the medical center with cholera, bloody diarrhea (indicating dysentery), Action Against Hunger repaired the borehole in Nkoteyia, reducing walking time to one hour.
Nkaeria Lekimariri's speech on the blubber bleeds from feelings exceeding the health needs she has settled. She is grateful that she and her children would not go to the hospital. Now she has the choice of how she would spend her time.
"I love white and I would never wear it before because the clothes would be tarnished or I would wash myself as often as I would have liked," she told Lifestyle.
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