The rustic wooden house in Soka village seemed a scary place for the children who emerged crying loudly.
The house in the western part of Rote Ndao is in fact an integrated health post called Mawar I, where several women including Yohanna Zacharias tend to the village children’s health.
Some infants wailed with fear as they were placed in a carrying cloth to be weighed on scales, while others screamed when a midwife injected them in the thigh with a BCG vaccine, which prevents tuberculosis and other diseases.
“Hush… do not cry, dear,” Yohanna told a frightened child. After weighing the child, she read out the child’s weight to her assistant who wrote it on the child’s “Road to health” card.
The post workers and the parents of about 29 children under 5 in the village said the post operated on the 18th day of every month. The children are weighed and vaccinated, and are tested for malnutrition – a medical condition that plagues East Nusa Tenggara.
Yohanna said children and mothers could be saved by developing wider access to children’s weight and height monitoring, immunization services and basic information on diet.
“These help local women to better care for themselves during pregnancy, as well as helping them nurture their newly born babies,” she told journalists on the sidelines of a six-day media visit to World Vision Indonesia’s area development programs in Rote Ndao.
In the beginning it was not easy to encourage local communities to take advantage of the health services at Mawar I post.
“They relied on their own traditional ways; they did not know that some of the beliefs might negatively affect their children’s health,” Yohanna said. Many local women gave their newly born babies sugar palm water taken from palmyra palm trees as their first food intake instead of breast-feeding them, she said.
“They believe that sugar palm water will make their babies strong and stay healthy. Meanwhile, colostrum in their breast milk is seen as a dirty substance, but in fact it strengthens the immune systems of newborns,” she said.
Many expectant mothers in Rote Ndao regency are also not aware of the importance of nutritious intake during their pregnancy. As a result, they tend to deliver babies under 2.5 kilograms on average, making Rote Ndao one of the few regencies in the country with quite a high prevalence of children with stunted growth.
The 2010 Basic Health Research shows that almost 50 percent of pregnant mother in Indonesia do not receive adequate energy and protein intake.
East Nusa Tengara is one of the provinces with the highest mortality rate on maternal and children under five years old, most of them are caused by malnutrition. The rate of malnutrition among children under five in Rote Ndao is 40.8 percent – the highest in the country after Aceh, whose rate is 48.7 percent.
“It’s alarming since malnutrition is closely related to more than 30 percent of infant mortalities in Rote Ndao caused by preventable problems like pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria,” said Lina Setiawati, the nutrition coordinator of Wahana Visi Indonesia-Rote Ndao Office, the local partner of World Vision Indonesia.
Tuberculosis also has quite a high prevalence in Rote Ndao due to its dusty dry weather and the unhealthy living conditions.
Health workers and midwives in Soka have long warned about trhe dangers of poor nutrition.
Last year, members of Wahana Visi Indonesia provided training on health and nutrition for midwives and other women. The Mawar I post was then given a second name: The Soka Nutrition Post.
Children who fall under the yellow line or red line on the nutrition chart are categorized as malnourished, and have to join a 12-day nutrition improvement program provided by the nutrition post. Three rounds of nutrition services have been delivered so far.
In the first round, held from April 26 to May 8, 2010, eight out of 11 malnourished children gained 0.2 to 1.0 kilograms in weight after their mothers followed the set balanced diet menu, which includes readily available ingredients: Sorghum, pumpkin, corn, cassava, sweet potatoes, spinach, and “kelor” or “merunggai” leaves from a small quick-growing tree cultivated for its edible pinnate leaves.
“By using local food crops that are easily planted in our house yards, our children can catch up on their growth,” said Dorsila Dillak, a member of the Soka Nutrition Post.
Dorsila said there would be no malnourished children in the regency if the people understood that their wealth of local food crops were rich in carbohydrates, minerals, protein and vitamins.
