One of the ways I’ve gotten to serve here at Canaan is with Medika Mamba. This is a program through the medical clinic here at Canaan. The purpose of this program is to help bring malnourished children to healthy weight. How do they do this? With medically enriched peanut butter. Mamba is Creole for peanut butter. The mamba has peanuts, vegetable oil, powdered milk, sugar, and vitamins and minerals.
On Tuesday afternoons patients would come to the clinic for Medika Mamba. Those in the program had to return weekly to be weighed and to receive their next supply of mamba. My responsibility was to help weigh and measure the kids. You would be amazed at how much babies cry when you place them on a scale. You would think that I was torturing them the way they were crying. If the baby was a new patient we would have to both weigh and measure their height to see if they qualified as malnourished. I got to be there for two Tuesdays in a row and got to see the progress of weight gain even after one week. My other responsibility was to give the kids worm medicine. Often times the kids would have bloated stomachs because they had worms and that was affecting their ability to maintain nutrients and a healthy body weight.
On Fridays we go to Areahaia and do Medika Mamba there. It was cool to see another part of Haiti. We would hold the program in a classroom of a school in the afternoon.
One of the hard things is when the child did not gain weight or lost weight and it was because the family was giving the mamba to other kids in the family or not following the directions given by Elsie the nurse who runs the clinic and Medika Mamba.
It was a new experience for me to work in a medical clinic. I had never had much of an interest in medical stuff before but this program interested me and was glad for the opportunity to be a part of it for the past few weeks.
We will be leaving Canaan on Sunday morning and heading to Santo Domingo, DR for our debrief. Our coaches Mike and Patti will be flying to the DR to meet with us for the following week. Pray for safe travels for all of us. It is an 8 hour bus ride back to Santo Domingo.
