More guava jelly and coffee; less formula, please.
I’m passing a rainy afternoon on the porch of Casa Roja. Through the house, I can hear the roar of the downpour on the kitchen’s tin roof. Outside the wrought-iron enclosure of our front porch, water is dripping from the fern, the banana leaves, the birds-of-paradise, the mango tree across the way (oh, mangoes, how I wish you were ripe already!). The rain is much-needed – it’s been a dry April in Consuelo.
This is my third visit here, and this time it’s just me and Maura Murphy, CHOP Global Health Program Manager. We’ve come to meet, observe, brainstorm, and begin to develop ideas about how we can grow and shape the Global Health program here going forward. We’re looking for ways to do this that are sustainable, useful to the community, and valuable to our clinical partners. It’s an exciting project, and I feel lucky to be here not just because it’s, you know, the Dominican Republic (warm weather, warm people, amazing coffee, merengue and bachata, tropical paradise, etc).
We arrived on Monday. Without wasting a minute, we dropped our bags and headed back out to meet Lara and Ramona in Barrio Puerto Principe, where they and a breastfeeding expert from San Pedro’s chapter of La Leche League were leading a workshop for the pregnant women and new mothers of the barrio. Priscilla, the lactation expert, reviewed with the women the benefits to mom and baby of breastfeeding, dispelled myths, gave advice. A few babies sat quietly on their mothers’ laps throughout the meeting, gorgeously fat and bright-eyed little testimonials to the benefits of breastfeeding. This type of workshop is especially important here, in a place where there’s a popular sentiment, for some reason, that formula is best – even though clean water to prepare it with is often extraordinarily difficult or time-consuming to come by.
Afterwards, we made our way along the rocky dirt roads of Barrio Villa Verde for another workshop with that barrio’s new and expectant mothers. In both places, I noticed the mothers’ pride when we congratulated them on the considerable achievement of exclusive breastfeeding. Now, Priscilla will meet with the women of each barrio monthly, and the health promoters will lead monthly breastfeeding support groups. The NPS team has been tireless in its efforts to encourage breastfeeding in the barrios, and it’s exciting to see that their efforts (if those happy, pudgy little niños we saw at the breastfeeding meetings are any indication) are finally paying off.
Changing popular sentiment is no small undertaking, and we have a long way to go. Last night, Maura and I went to Zaglul, the local supermarket, to buy some essentials. I wanted to get some guava jelly, and, as it happens, the jelly shelf is in the infant formula aisle. That’s right. One (half empty) shelf for jellies and jams, and an entire half aisle for infant formula, stocked floor to ceiling with more varieties than I ever could have imagined existed (and I’m a pediatrician). We sighed, then moved on – I cleaned out the coffee shelf and we were on our way.
But it’s exciting to think that the NPS barrios, where breastfeeding as a practice seems to be gaining some real traction, could be leading the way for a change in how Consuelans feed their babies. It would give those mamas something big of which to be even prouder.
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Posted at 10:37PM Apr 27, 2011 by Pamela Mazzeo MD in Health | Comments[0]