almost in the villages

I think I'm finally on the runway for getting to the villages for a more concerted period of time. I was supposed to stay last night but my room wasn't ready, so it looks like it will be Monday. I went back to the villages yesterday though- the one I went to was an hour from the 'entrance' village Ruhiira, so my total time in the car to attend a 2 hour meeting with community health workers and midwives was 3.5 + hours! The meeting was, thankfully, run in English (most conversation between Ugandans here is in Runyankole) and was fascinating and worth the trip- people wrestling with trying to have very different levels of health workers communicate effectively with a final common goal. (which sounds pretty familiar, right?) Basic things like what the community health workers actually do was shared. What they do is a lot- the CHW's each have about 200 households that they're expected to see monthly. The CHW sees households more frequently if there's a pregnant woman, a small child, someone who's sick. They do a lot of counseling (nutrition, bed nets, antenatal care, encouraging health center births, encouraging family planning); they're being trained to give vaccines; they give oral rehydration solution for children with diarrhea and can give malaria medication if the person has had a positive rapid test. A fair amount of time is spent on recording information- they have a number of data entry people who put information into a computer when it's working (also painfully familiar?) but the information tends to passed up a ladder and is not necessarily shared. The first photo is a poster of a woman's daily work (looks like everything to me-notice she has 5 arms!); the second is the village center of Ruhiira.