I've just returned from a 5-day trip to several villages in Los Palos on the eastern tip of Timor, to visit the resident missionaries, conduct community health talks and deworm children.
Gut worms are universal in rural Timor, mainly due to poor sanitation. When one infected child defecates behind a bush, rain and groundwater flow eventually carry the worms to the community’s well – everybody’s drinking water.
The government school health programme includes mass-deworming, but many places have yet to climb on board. So our plan was to carpetbomb our villages’ 2-5-year-olds with deworming meds.
Easier said than done.
Generations of threats from bulging-eyed mothers has left Timorese children with a deep confidence that if you’re naughty, the Evil Foreigners will kidnap you, and – depending on the creativity of your mother – beat/imprison/eat you, feed you vegetables, turn you into a goat or give you injections.
Predictably, being lined up to receive deworming medicine at our hands created much holy terror.
Some children gave wary assent:
Many went ballistic:
And this guy:
survived the ordeal with deworming meds everywhere except down his throat.
Exhausting. For all involved.
But rewarding. I’m told that entire villages are now abuzz about whose kid has passed out the most worms.
Let’s just hope it wasn't behind another bush.
-raj
2 comments:
Well, the kids who are strong enough to ward off every adult with deworming meds in sight probably don't have so many worms...
Well we gave his mum a dose to hide in his dinner anyway.
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