Good Eats...

Another update on the work front: I helped with a malnutrition formation with high school students in a local village a few weeks ago. Then last week I held the same formation in my village. Another volunteer and I recruited the help of the local health center to effectively pass the information to the kids. It went much better the second time because the first outing was competing with national vaccinations from unicef and it rested on a Friday. We offered formation tee-shirts to the first kid to bring me an enriched porridge (they eat this stuff for breakfast and it is call bouille) which we showed them how to make...and a second tee-shirt will go to the winner of an essay contest. The subject of the essay was: 'What are the benefits to eating well/good nutrition?' Of course, at the end of the formation, the science teacher (who's help I recruited and did nothing at all throughout the entire formation) decided it was his time to talk and wanted the PCVs to give all the kids at the formation tee-shirts. This is a very typical response to formations because locals here don't value the information you give them (or in our case we gave them FREE FOOD), they want you to hand out money or gifts. It was an unfortunate way to end the formation having to convince the teacher that we were not being paid by the government to provide tee-shirts to ALL students and we were no pocketing anything and a large portion of the previous presentation's materials, including tee-shirts and food, came out of our volunteer pockets. I won't be working with this teacher again. But the health center speaker was great when she showed up...now all subsequent formations will try to include a staff member from the local health centers.