A devastating death, moving forward with better health knowledge

Phouy, 20, lives in a World Vision project area called Ngoi in Luang Prabang Province.

When asked why her face seems to beam with joy she answered, “My happiness is when I see my healthy three-year-old son. He is my second child.”

Phouy married at a young age, just 17-years-old and was soon pregnant.

“I did not know how to take care of myself when I was pregnant, like eating nutritious food or how to take care of a newborn, or about breastfeeding. We live in the remote area and only boats can access our village.”

She continued, “I wasn’t concerned about him being thin because I thought that was normal. He always cried and after five days he died. It was very bad experience and I won’t forget it.”

Her village is more than one-hour away, 12km, by boat on the Ou River from Ngoi town

Mr. Somephone Xayakone the village chief said, “We faced many difficulties when people got sick. There was a lack of health care, sanitation, and access to information about health care."

Helping to combat this lack of access to basic health care and knowledge, in 2011, a World Vision Health Project called Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD), began activities that help communities find ways to overcome and cope with the problem of child malnutrition, focusing on children under 5-years-old.

One activity is called PD-Hearth, a series of training classes for parents of underweight preschool children. Each mother is asked to bring from home a food-item to share, and then the instructors demonstrate and cook a nutritious meal especially for the children. Examples of what the mothers bring that are locally available include frogs, morning glory greens, rice, cassava, spring onion, spinach, and coconut.

Parents continue to practice what they learned and after two weeks World Vision staff and health workers follow-up to weigh the children again. If the children are not gaining weight, the parents are asked to bring their children back to the programme for another 12 days.

Mothers also learn about breastfeeding, health, pregnancy care, and how to play with their children for their development.

Phouy is a direct beneficiary of this health education. She used what she learned when she became pregnant with her second child, named Fino.

“I received all the health care information and joined in cooking nutritious food for my child. Now he is healthy. I am happy when I see my son playing and I play with him as well,” said Phouy.

“Since World Vision implemented the health program in our village, we are using clean water, clean latrines, and have a village medicine cabinet fund. Women have access to health care information and we have reduced numbers of children with malnutrition in the village,” the village chief added.

Phet, another beneficiary of the ECCD programme said, “Before the World Vision project took root here, some children died because we put too much faith in treatments that we thought were ordered by the gods. When anyone became ill we didn’t take him or her to the hospital because we thought we had offended the spirits in some way.”

She continued, “World Vision staff came to our village and taught us different practices. At first we didn’t believe them and continued with the ways of treatment. We went into the woods to find the right tree to make medicine but that wasn’t very satisfactory because we usually didn’t know the cause of our illness. We didn’t go to the hospital until we were seriously ill.”

In 2015, World Vision’s Ngoi programme conducted monitoring activities by visiting and interviewing children who are involved in the Early Childhood Care and Development programme. In the 28 target villages with 1,176 children and they found that malnutrition rates were reduced, finding only 92 children that remain malnourished. The malnutrition rates were determined using the MUAC tool.