Tuesday’s update is brought to you one of our new Global Health Fellows – Erin Clayton (2021).
This morning at my home stay with Michela, Kara and Gabby (a GPSA fellow), Miss Dorita made us Johnny cakes. A Johnny cake is a sweet, dense biscuit that is eaten with jam and jellies or even peanut butter. After this delicious breakfast, we set out for the community center where our transportation picked us up to take us to Los Tambos.
Los Tambos is located about an hour away from San Antonio, where we are staying. I saw it as a much more rural community with a prevalent farming lifestyle. All morning we visited homes to take temperature, pulse, respiration rate, height, weight, BMI, blood pressure, and blood glucose. Although my group (we split into two teams for this activity) only visited three houses, we were able to connect with the patients we visited
with. At the last house we visited, the Spanish-speaking members of our group had a long conversation about the struggles Los Tambos experiences. These were mainly related to money, poor education, and lack of access to medicine. A lot of my group and myself ended up feeling a bit helpless with the problems the community experiences. By the end of our morning in Los Tambos, we gained a contact with an influential figure there, Kendrick Hernandez. We plan on contacting him in the future to see how we can help.
After a lunch break, we returned to the community center and spent the afternoon there with different lessons. First, Kirsten taught us about nutrition, malnutrition, and obesity. Then, Luis taught us some Spanish phrases that will be useful for our home stay visits. Lastly, Gabby taught us about oral health and even how to make our own toothpaste! We spent the last hour before dinner working on our projects for our visit to the school Thursday. I am part of the Women’s Empowerment group and am very excited to teach the girls.
After dinner at our home stay, the whole group met at the Women’s Co-Op for a fun game of trivia. The topics ranged from infectious diseases to pop culture and my team (unBelizeable) came out as winners!