Health Program in January, 2012

Village HopeCore International began the year 2012 with many achievements! We distributed free insecticide-treated mosquito nets to nearly 700 primary school students, teachers, and staff. They were very happy to receive the nets, and our peer educators taught them the importance of preventing malaria. At each mobile clinic partner school, our peer educators are demonstrating how to hang the nets and encourage students to use them at home. Our community health workers will visit about 30 homes per school to monitor whether people are using our nets. We are looking forward to reporting the reduction of malaria incidence in the near future. Another achievement for this month was that we trained 24 peer educators for our health program. Peer educators participated in a 5-day training course, which covered behavior change communication, HIV/AIDS, self-esteem, monitoring, and evaluation. These trained peer educators will join our mobile clinics soon to provide health education to primary and secondary school students. We will report how our peer educators are benefiting local school communities. From February, we will establish health clubs at our mobile clinic partner schools, so those students who are interested in health issues can receive more learning opportunities. In order to make this initiative a great success, we are in the process of purchasing educational materials from a Ugandan NGO and providing them to students. We are excited about this new initiative!