Our Coffee Camps provide students with regular visits from healthcare experts, including a student nurse, who keeps records of each student’s weight and height, and administers vital health screening such as the lice-checks captured in the following photos:
Our nurse, Anielka, tells me when she started these visits (in December) she found lots of lice in the student population, but now (2 months into the program) she finds few cases.
Still, when campers DO have lice, they get a free Coffee Camp Piopel bath, which my students seem to enjoy, as it involves a walk to the village well and plenty of extra attention from Anielka:
In Ocalca, this is a two-person pump, due to a broken spigot pipe. (So here we have two good measures of poverty in a community: one is the percentage of inhabitants living in need of basic healthcare materials and attention, the other is how long it takes vital infrastructure (e.g. daily survival use) to get repaired.)
Coffee Camp health programs run off of materials (medicine, combs, lemons, etc.) donated by the town health office. Anielka specifically identifies a dire shortage in the following types of items:
- first aid kits
- basic nutritional vitamins for children
- more de-lousing medicine (these children, now louse-free, will return tonight to homes where headlice are still endemic…)
We’re hoping to organize donations towards these accounts via Planting Hope and other partner orgs.
Meanwhile, in the next classroom over, our dentistry team’s inspection visit proceeded in like manner…
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