Written by Give Us Wings Volunteer, Mary Sue House

January 18th, 2010

Mary Sue is on her 4^th trip with Give Us Wings and wrote from our site in Nyaoga, Kenya.

In August of 2008, Mary Sue conducted an initial training for 10 women to serve as Community Health Care Workers in the Nyaoga area. This same training was provided for 10 Community Health Care Workers in Tororo, Uganda. This January she is traveling again as a volunteer, back to her friends in Kenya and Uganda to provide continuing education for these community workers.

Greetings from “the Nyaoga Young Women” to all of the previous trip volunteers!  They asked me today to be sure to greet all of you in particular.

This was the last day of Continuing Education for the Village Health Care Workers.  Ten of these women originally completed the training that we held in August of 2008.  I was told to expect 2-3 women for a curriculum planning session the day before class was to begin…every one of  the 10 showed up to do the planning.  Topics were chosen by them from both new material and review materials.  What eager, enthusiastic learners!

The classes finished at noon today and they all received their certificates with delight.

An additional delight was my being taken aside by Wycliff, the bacteriologist responsible for the lab at the Nyaoga Clinic.  He wanted to show me the impact that the Village Health Care Worker training has had on the health of the villagers.  Since their original training in ’08 there is a documented 96% decrease in diarrheal diseases! Not only are these women good learners, but their work in the village has had a significant and measurable impact!

Many thanks to all of you Give Us Wings supporters for making this possible.

--Mary Sue