Save the Children - Health Care in Ethiopia

This week I watched a video from the Save The Children YouTube channel.  Save the Children is an organization whose goal is to make sure children around the world are healthy, happy and have their needs met.  They have several programs ranging from providing preschool services, health clinics and farming supplies to poor families.  They also work to alleviate HIV and AIDS and respond to natural disasters with aid.

The video, found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgNh-ZlzMiI&list=PL00004DF975592015,  focused on the health care available to poor villagers in Ethiopia.

In the video is  Aster, a local health worker.  Everyday, in order to provide meager basic care in a village clinic she walks 12 kilometers from her home.  At the clinic, the only one for miles around, she works to dispense medicine, vaccinations and provide what we would term as well baby checkups.  She also spends half of her day traveling to visits new mothers in their homes to check on them and baby after giving birth.  She instructs them in breastfeeding, among other things.  And then she walks 12 kilometers home.  She is just one woman who has to work to treat preventable illnesses for a community of people who are poverty stricken.

It puts into perspective how we take our own health care system (as riddled wit flaws as it is) for granted.  In general, every child and mother who needs health care can get access, and with Obamacare that will be affordably extended to even more families who fall in the grey area of not being considered “poor”, but also still having to scrape by every month.  I cannot imagine the grief if my baby were to become ill and die from some simple, preventable sickness that a common antibiotic could have dealt with.

It is a shame, because there are too many rich countries in the world, and basic drugs are too cheap, that any child should have to go to such lengths for medical care.

National Black Child Development Institute

The focus of my study this week is the National Black Child Development Institute (http://www.nbcdi.org/resource).  Their focus is on advocacy exclusively for Black American students through community organizations as well as public and private school systems.  They deal with ages birth through eight and have a wide range of activities that focus on the health, education and family engagement of Black students.

A current issue discussed on the website(http://www.nbcdi.org/sites/default/files/resource-files/A%20Framework%20That%20Works.pdf) is the disparity between the effectiveness and education of teachers who serve urban areas and those who serve suburban areas.  Some very interesting statistics were provided detailing the educational achievement and engagement o teachers who serve low income minority children.  Compared to suburban teachers, certification exams scores are lower and interpersonal effectiveness also suffers when placed in urban classrooms.

One wonders at why this is.  The first practical reason is that teachers with higher test scores are more likely to be hired by school districts that pay more (i.e., the suburbs) and are also more likely to have support in the classroom as far as paraprofessionals, parental involvement, smaller class size and materials.  So it makes sense as well that suburban teachers would be more “engaged.”  It is, in my opinion, easy to engage with your students when you don’t have to face many of the grim realities of understaffed, undersupplied, poorly managed inner city schools.  Urban teachers are also in my common sense view, more likely to burn out due to having larger class sizes and having to deal with the personals issues of their students that tend to arise in low income neighborhoods.  So maybe the article shouldn’t be looking at the fact that inner city teachers are less engaged and have lower test scores, maybe the article should be looking at why teachers are less engaged and whether they are given the pedagogical support they may need.

Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

This week in an attempt to pick the brains of ECE professionals around the world, I sent an email to the Nairobi and Mena regional offices of Unicef and to Rev. Charles Nonoo and the Philippines office of the NAEYC Global Alliance.  Hopefully I will receive a response which indicates a willingness to open a line of dialogue.  If I do not receive response by Wednesday, I will begin the Alternative assignment.

After perusing the selection of websites for study I immediately focused on the National Black Child Development institute.  It is nice to be able to study my own people, since that is my first priority and the main population I work with.