“Meekwobes”
On Tuesday, Kelly and I began teaching English to the teachers! We’ve covered basic greetings, numbers, and the family so far. After we taught the vocabulary in English, the teachers taught us the vocabulary in Creole. It’s been a great way for us to interact and bond with the teachers. The teachers’ enthusiasm inspires me to learn Creole as well.
When we taught the 6th grade class, Kelly and I noticed that the students have misconceptions about malaria. They seemed to believe that diseases like typhoid, the common cold, and malaria came from microbes in water. When our translator showed us the water pumps around Terrier Rouge, even he said that you can get typhoid or malaria from the water. I think we’ve found another topic to cover, to say the least!
Yesterday, we had a busy morning with the preschoolers and kindergarteners. We tried our best to teach them the hand-washing song, but to be honest, they were really distracted by our presence—as Kelly and I walked around the classroom, singing the song and showing the hand motions, they stopped singing and just stared at us as we came closer. It seems as if the 3-year-olds have a 3-second attention span, the 4-year-olds have a 4-second attention span, etc…. Next week, we’ll have to find some activities that are a little more engaging.
In the afternoon, we demonstrated the Diagnostic Backpack to Dr. Gustave, who was very impressed with the backpack as well.
Best news of the week—there will be a mobile clinic tentatively on Saturday, June 20th, with Dr. Lucien and Dr. Gustave, in which we will participate and see the backpacks in action! It’s great that the doctors are willing to take time out of their weekend to run a mobile clinic and test the prototypes.
We also briefly heard about the clinic’s community health workers who go door-to-door administering basic treatments and medications. They may even follow the DOT system (Directly-Observed Therapy), which is used for TB, HIV, and other types of patients on strict medication regimens in order to prevent drug resistance. Kelly and I hope to observe their work at some point and see if we could make any contributions or improvements to their work in Terrier Rouge.
Today was thought-provoking day for Kelly and I, as well as the kids. Our next round of lessons focuses (ha ha) on the microscope and how to view microbes in the microscope. In the first 1st grade class, we had a few technical difficulties (even your basic microscope can stump a couple of college students…. after much head scratching, we decided to pull out the directions!), but we quickly fixed the problem and showed the class the “meekwobes,” as they pronounce it. They watched the microbes swim across my computer screen (we had a small camera attached to the eyepiece so they could view the microbes on a larger screen) and were fascinated by their movement. I think it was especially interesting to them because the water containing the microbes looked very clean.
After all of the students saw the swimming microbes, we added Clorox to the water sample, and the students then observed the immobile microbes.
In the 2nd grade class, we also had time to introduce the concept of cells, explain what they are, and how we have millions and millions of cells in our body (we figured that the word “trillion” might be confusing). We ran out of time to swab our own cheek cells and show them in the microscope, but we hope to try it on Monday with the upper grades.
Here are a few photos taken over the past two weeks:
