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Jakarta Post

Teenagers lend a helping hand to fight malnutrition

Yohanes Bere is an 18-year-old ojek motorcycle taxi driver

Yemris Fointuna (The Jakarta Post)
Atambua
Fri, February 19, 2010

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Teenagers lend a helping hand to fight malnutrition

Y

ohanes Bere is an 18-year-old ojek motorcycle taxi driver. But he is often busy assisting mothers who took their babies and toddlers to an integrated health service post in Kekirence village in Belu regency, East Nusa Tenggara.

Without hesitation, he helps weigh the babies and toddlers, and provides breastfeeding mothers with knowledge about healthy lifestyles, including the importance of giving breast milk exclusively to newborn babies until they are at least six months old.

“I want to see the babies and toddlers I serve one day grow up into healthy generation,” said Yohanes, who learned to do the job through teaching himself and training from health officials and a medical team.

The teenager joined as a volunteer in the health post – locally known as posyandu – to help reduce malnutrition cases in the village.

“Now we no longer have malnourished babies or toddlers,” he said proudly.

Another teenager, 17-year-old Maria Bere, decided to sign up as a volunteer two years ago after graduating from junior high school in Atambua, the regency capital town.

She visits breastfeeding mothers and offers counseling on how to nurse babies, hold them the right way and feed them healthily, although she is still unmarried.

”I learned from brochures and leaflets. Sometimes I join workshops organized for the health post volunteers,” Maria said.

Her biggest challenge was the mothers’ lack of knowledge – many pregnant and breastfeeding mothers just eat rice and do not make use of their resourceful yards where many nutritious plants grow.

“Sometimes, they just leave ripe papayas in the yard to rot on the trees and be eaten by birds or simply fall to the ground while their children do not consume any fruits,” she said.

“This is what I have been trying to change.”

With the teenage volunteers’ help, Belu regency is now registered as one of the most successful regions in the province in reducing the malnutrition rate of babies and toddlers under five years old for the last three years.

Halomodok subdistrict head Jaime de Jesus was proud when saying that his subdistrict, once declared prone to malnutrition, was named one of the living laboratories in the region in terms of the fight against malnutrition. The subdistrict is home of 1,621 families or 3,000 people.

“This is not just the result of my own hard work but also the work of posyandu volunteers...Thanks to their hard work, no child is suffering from malnutrition in our subdistrict now,” he told  The Jakarta Post.

Resident Dominggus Pareira de Olievera said the six-month exclusive breastfeeding program introduced by posyandu in his village has helped his family.

“We don’t need to buy formula for our three-month-old baby,” said the 43-year-old resident of Halomodok whose baby was named the healthiest in his village’s health post. “What we have to do is just feed the mother with sufficiently healthy food and visit the posyandu or puskesmas [community health center] routinely and the child will grow healthily.”

The Belu regency administration records that up to the end of last year, the rate of people’s participation in posyandu is 81.6 percent, a landslide increase compared to 2008. The regency is home to 756 posyandu, which are spread in more than 300 subdistricts.

Benediktus Agas of the regency’s health office said that half of the posyandu were still providing their services in simple places – under the trees or in a villager’s house due to lack of permanent building for holding its activities.

He said that until 2007, half of the babies and toddlers in the regency were still suffering from malnutrition. With the posyandu revitalization program revived by the government in cooperation with Unicef, the number of malnutrition cases in the regency has drastically decreased.

Communication Specialist of Unicef Indonesia, Lely Djuhari, said Belu was deliberately chosen as a recipient for the program since 2007 mainly because it was a region with the highest number of malnutrition cases in the country.

“The project is funded by the Australian government and is aimed at improving the health service capacity and providing nutritious foods,” she said.

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