The final days – action time!
Updated: Jan 14, 2021
This is likely my final India blog post! I am returning home in 4 DAYS! 🙂 I had fun, but I’m ready to come home. I’m craving some American food – salad with ranch dressing, a cheeseburger, some corn on the cob….mmmmm, my mouth waters just thinking about it.
These girls loved us. The whole time we were they they wanted to play with us!
Who wouldn’t want to be measured next to this cute giraffe??
This wasn’t part of our nutrition intervention, but it was something the last group of interns worked on when they were here back in November. They developed a system to accurately measure anthropometrics (height and weight). Unfortunately, they ran out of time and the 4th daycare didn’t get a cute painting on the wall to use to measure height. We thought this was important to finish because the height ruler this daycare had was very inaccurate and not attached to the wall properly.
Our poster that we painted showing the different parts of the plant that food comes from.
This week it was time to implement our nutrition intervention for the community. We developed a lesson plan to help educate 3-5 year old children on fruits and vegetables in the hopes of building knowledge and enhancing food acceptance. Agriculture is closely linked to nutrition in India, so we wanted to capture that as well. We developed a poster that depicts the various parts of a plant that food comes from. We also brought in a variety of foods for the children to practice matching up which foods are fruits, seeds, stems, roots, leaves or flowers. They also sampled the foods. We had a fun day – the children were engaged and excited and the teachers seemed to enjoy the lesson as well. We left instructions for the teacher so that the lesson can be taught again in the future and
Another area we found a need for was the types of growth charts used at the daycares. Currently, they are only using weight-for-age growth charts. What they really need to be using is length-for-weight – this will be a better tool to determine malnutrition. Another goal of ours it to print off the length-for-weight growth charts and provide them to the daycare teachers to use.
Overall, this has been quite a learning experience! Not only did I experience extreme cultural diversity, but I developed team work abilities, learned what it’s like using a translator, practiced taking anthropometrics (including mid-arm circumference) and plotting them on growth charts, and lesson plan development for an age group that I haven’t yet worked with in my work experiences.