Children for Health Newsletter March 2022
Clare Hanbury
Founder & Director at Children for Health | Promoting Child-Centered Health Education | Award-Winning NGO Leader Driving Global Health Initiatives
Dear Friends,
I got?Covid?in January and it was a strange month. I thought for a minute I had lost energy for work but no, it was only Covid. I have had the two vaccinations AND the booster and still was in bed with it for five days – so if you haven’t had your?vaccinations?people – please get them. Would I even be here now if I had got Covid last year while unvaccinated?
This topic brings me to the wonderful news that our…
Immunisation Poster is now published!
Do download it so you can see the back of it too and?let us know what you think. As with?all our posters?it involved very many experts from around the world and will be used in Kenyan schools next month. Share the link with any friends whom you think might use it.https://www.childrenforhealth.org/ImmunisationPoster
New Website Theme Launch
This week also sees the launch of our new website which is SO much slicker on the mobile. 85% of our views are by people using mobile devices so we had to revise and upgrade the site. We worked with a great team in India and although we had planned a January launch – for all sorts of reasons (and mostly my health) things were delayed. Do check it out and give us your feedback. It has been a huge amount of work, but we are so happy with the result and a big shout out to?Amy?who handles our website and so much more for all the work she has put in and for her nagging me to do my bit too.
Diabetes Poster
You may remember in our last newsletter that we published a?Poster on Diabetes. 1000 copies of the poster have just been printed and are about to be distributed to schools in Guam.
Here is the link again:
The reason I mention it again today is that the brilliant folks in Guam have raised more funding for a storybook and teachers’ resource book on Diabetes. We are currently figuring out more about Diabetes in Guam from key people there and this includes finding out what children themselves know and feel about the topic so that they can help to start addressing some of the root causes.
We’ve helped to run a workshop there and, as usual, the children are so concerned, compassionate and caring and full of creative ideas on things that can be done. We are now designing workshops and will be training and supporting the teachers as we identify some good stories, activities, and strategies to prevent and reduce the effects of type 2 diabetes. All these ideas will fuel the development of a new storybook for chiudlrne and their teachers.
Two workshops on HIV and AIDS in Eswatini…
…have gone ahead in recent weeks and even the very experienced headteacher has been surprised and delighted by what the children know and what they are saying they want to do to help inform people, to support those who are HIV positive, and to reduce the stigma of?HIV and AIDS. We have also uncovered one or two myths about HIV and AIDS that need addressing.
With their help we are in the final stages of developing our HIV poster and we will be using their ideas to develop the new storybook.
领英推荐
We have had very strong review panels for all three of our recently developed posters (Immunisation, HIV & AIDS and Diabetes).
SuperBetter Children in Zambia
We are nearing completion on this one year well-being and health project. The children have learned Social and Emotional Learning skills and now they are using these and the Super Better framework based on the work of our allies www.superbetter.com (see blog posts below for a fuller explanation!). The children are using their skills to tackle two pressing physical health projects (malaria and nutrition) plus a mental health project. Malaria has been chosen as their first topic as a 7-year-old sister of one of our club members died from Malaria in November 2021.
PCAANS in Changara, Mozambique
PCAANS is an acronym for the ‘Participation of Children in Learning and Action for Nutrition and Health’ – in Portuguese!
It’s a?programme in Mozambique?that I’ve been involved with since 2011. Just before the pandemic we got the thumbs up from the Ministry of Education – they wanted it scaled in the country! But, the badly timed pandemic has thrown a spanner in the works and we seem to be dealing with new issues. So, we are developing a PCAANS Toolkit to bring to gather all the best ideas from the programme and we will translate these into Portuguese. The Toolkit then will be made available to those people and schools with whom we have been most closely associated in Mozambique over the years and serve as a showpiece for organisations wanting to understand what we have already achieved there.
A generous donor has enabled this really important process and allowed us to keep going and build upon the work that has been so well received in the country.
More… more… more…
There is a lot more going on but that’s probably enough to convince you – our dear community – that we are alive and well.
We have lots of plans which we are reasonably optimistic will come through for us in the next six months. I will keep you posted and intend to publish a monthly newsletter. Now on Linked in TOO!
Do get in touch if you want to find out more.
?With best wishes
Clare
P.S. I am still on the island of Alderney and sometimes swimming with seals. Yes, this photo is of me!