madhya pradesh

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By Jaimie Shaff

Program Manager: Health and Nutrition

This past Tuesday marked my 14th day in India, aka my deadline for registration with the government of India. Since landing in this beautiful country, I have hit the ground running. The programs developed and implemented by RMF-India are absolutely incredible. Despite the fact that I was here evaluating the malnutrition program in January, I was certainly unprepared for how much the programs have expanded. The community has become more familiar with the faces of Caitlin, Michael, Fabian, and the rest of the field-staff, and the programs are developing with a strong focus on community.

With some slight confusion, train travel, and broken Hindi, I finally registered with the government powers that be this morning. My handwritten FRO note is in my passport, and I’m about 60% sure that I’ll be able to leave the country in December without any major hurdles.

In my short time here, I have met with many of the major organizations contributing towards humanitarian and developmental efforts in under-nutrition and HIV/AIDS in India.  RMF is well received and respected by large organizations, as the only International NGO working directly with the Bhil tribal population in MP. I look forward to becoming more familiar with our programs, working to increase our efficacy and community-based sustainability, and creating technical/operating partnerships with other actors in this field.

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The Real Medicine Foundation (RMF) and NYU’s prestigious Capstone program have announced a partnership and three graduate students have arrived in Jhabua, Madyha Pradesh to assist with RMF’s malnutrition program.
An estimated 60 million children under the age of five are estimated to be malnourished India. The state where RMF is concentrating, Madhya Pradesh, has the country’s highest malnutrition burden, with 60% of its children under-five malnourished. Of the six million malnourished children in the state, 1.3 million of them have severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and one million have moderate acute malnutrition (MAM).
Children with MAM are able to recover with careful diet regulation and nutritional supplements, and generally do not require hospitalization. SAM presents itself in two general forms: complicated and uncomplicated. Complicated SAM entails outlying medical complications such as hypothermia and pneumonia. Both forms of SAM require a minimum stay of 14 days in a hospital.
RMF’s comprehensive approach to eradicating malnutrition focuses on the entire continuum of care from identification to treatment and prevention. The students will be conducting 14 days of field research to gather information on malnutrition knowledge, prevention activities, and treatment in government facilities throughout Jhabua and Alirajpur districts. Their research will help provide RMF with baseline analysis for new districts and with information about communities and facilities that are in need of assistance, as well as identify obstacles and problems faced by malnutrition field workers when working with local communities.
We will be taking the students to all 5 Nutritional Rehabilitation Centers in Jhabua and Alirajpur to assess the centralized treatment of SAM. In addition, the students will be going to village Anganwadi Centers, both rural and town, to interview Anganwadi workers about their needs, knowledge, and any recommendations they may have into improvements that could help children.
The RMF team here is excited to have the students, and is very much looking forward to their help and insights!
capstonephoto

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RMF and friends paint rural MP

 butterfly

This past weekend 12 artists volunteered to travel overnight via train from Mumbai, Delhi, and Bhopal to spend the weekend in Jhabua helping RMF transform our new Nutrition Rehabilitation Center at Jeevan Jyoti Hospital from a dull hospital ward to a work of art.

This weekend, deemed the Wall Project MP, was the first collaboration between the Wall Project and RMF and was an astounding success!  The Wall Project is a group, founded in Mumbai, of artists (amateur and professional) who get together and create murals and public art displays across the cities.  They volunteered to help us transform the drab hospital walls of our NRC to a bright, cheerful place for children.

Having colorful walls isn’t just about the aesthetics of our NRC: Color and shape are also important for the children’s mental recovery as well.  A child who has a bright, interesting, and stimulating environment will have better neurological recovery and development than children in dull settings. 

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Selling Wives to Pay Debts: Madhya Pradesh

download Bewitched dvd

DSCN0083The following information was taken from the article: Desperate Farmers Sell Wives to Pay Debts in Rural India. High Noon video

In her article, Sarah Sidner describes how in India, husbands are selling their wives and parents are selling their daughters to pay off impossible debts incurred after years of drought and resulting crop failure.

Clearly, this is not simply an issue of poverty but also one of culture structure where women are seen as potential currency.

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Her Cardboard Lover release

Real Medicine Foundation and Jeevan Jyoti Health Service Society Inaugurate Integrated Counseling and Testing Center (ICTC) and Link ART Center in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh

A milestone for both Madhya Pradesh States AIDS Control Society’s and the people living with HIV/AIDS in Jhabua Streets of Fire ipod

The Crying Game download

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Widespread malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh, India – A note from the field

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Jhabua, Alirajpur, Khandwa, Khargone June 2009

The Student Prince movie Malnutrition is one of the most serious and large scale health problems facing the Indian state today:

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Field in Umri, Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. April 2009

Field in Umri, Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. April 2009

Last week I blogged about our program launch. We realize that it is unusual in the NGO world for an organization to launch such an ambitious initiative in such a short period of time. While in the ideal world we could have spent many more months planning, doing baselines assessments, and fundraising, we know that we need to act as soon as possible with the resources we have because if we wait too long human lives are our opportunity costs.

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Dr. Fabian Toegel addressing men and women representing over 40 tribal villages in malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention. April 25th, 2009

Dr. Fabian Toegel addressing men and women representing over 40 tribal villages in malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention. April 25th, 2009

After almost two months of planning, field assessments, and speaking to everyone from mothers of malnourished children to politicians we launched the first phase of our malnutrition eradication program in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh with two trainings in malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention over the past week. Our intervention will be a long-term, holistic initiative, with not just trainings but consistent onsite activities and follow up over the next two years, but this past week we started with the first step, a training to create awareness and to increase referrals of severe acute malnutrition to government centers.

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Starting RMF’s Malnutrition Program in India I Love Trouble

Last month sitting comfortably with a cup of coffee and my laptop, I sat on my balcony in Delhi and read a New York Times article by Somini Sengupta titled “As India Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/world/asia/13malnutrition.html Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End download ). Living in India and considering myself a well-informed hand of the development sector, I knew that malnutrition was one of the nagging problems pulling back at India’s development, but the awesome extent to which malnutrition plagues this country was a shock. With 46% of India’s future threatened by malnutrition, to call the problem India’s “a national shame,” in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is just the beginning.

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