The Complementary Feeding Seminars are so far not going nearly as well as the Family sessions did, and not nearly as well as we had hoped. We had planned 3 sessions at St Theresa’s hospital with the mothers from the MCH clinic, and 2 sessions with each of the women’s groups. Our first session at the hospital was a complete failure as not a single mother showed up. We scheduled a ‘make-up’ session the following Monday and had our fingers crossed that we would get a good turn out on our second try. We even posted flyers advertising the session around the hospital for mothers to see. Unfortunately, even after waiting an additional hour
before starting, we only had 6 mothers attend. We are used to having around 100 people or more attend our sessions within the community so it was very disheartening to present to only 6 people. One of the nurses at the hospital was translating for us, and asked us to keep the presentation to a maximum of 30 minutes. The presentation we had planned was over an hour, so we had to think fast and simplify our key messages on the spot. Our translator knew the material fairly well since she has taught many mothers similar information at the clinic. The information they give mothers, like our recommendations, are from the World Health Organization, but the resources they have a re slightly outdated. This caused a bit of a problem because as a result, our messages were not always being translated as they should have been. But as we have learned in Kenya, “sawa sawa”! In retrospect, we should have gone over our recommendations with our translator prior to presenting to the mothers. Despite being in Kenya for the last 10 weeks, we are still learning many new things everyday, and every presentation is an opportunity to further understand Kenyan culture.We were expecting a much higher attendance rate with the women’s groups since they had known about our presentation months in advance, however we were once again disappointed. Although it was really frustrating at first, we adapted to the small group and altered the presentation to allow for more discussion. Had we had the attendance we had hoped for, this may not have been possible. It actually ended up working well because the mothers were able to ask more questions and we were able to ensure that everything was really well understood. It also allowed us to get to know the mothers a little bit better since we were able to have conversations with the mothers, and the mothers were able to share tips and stories of their own experiences of complementary feeding to the rest of the group.
We also had a presentation in front of the hospital staff this week. We talked to them all about the various projects we have been working on since we arrived in Kenya. We shared the findings of our school lunch program research project with them and gave each staff member in attendance copies of both our Family Nutrition handout and the Complementary Feeding handout. We think the sisters were very surprised at the amount of work we had done since our arrival. Since we don’t work very closely with the hospital as this is a community placement and not a clinical placement, the sisters and hospital staff only see us on the rare occasion that we’re passing through the hospital. They never see us actually doing any work. It was great to be able to share with everyone what we have been doing and all that we have accomplished so far.
We only have a few presentations left as our time here in Kenya is quickly coming to an end. It seems unreal that in just two weeks we’ll be back on Canadian soil!
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