The last days in homestay village were anything but relaxing, though. I came back to village to hear that my sister had delivered her baby during the time I’d been away, a four-day old boy. While I’d known my recently-married sister was likely to give birth soon, I didn’t expect to be around to actually see the baby. He’s beautiful and healthy as anyone could hope, and I got a chance to hold him quite a bit on the day of the baby naming ceremony. Traditionally, when a child is born, Malians don’t give him or her a name for 5 days, at which time the men get together and choose a name. Meanwhile, the women come to visit the mother and child, bring gifts of soap or pagnes, and hold and coo over the baby–and sometimes, if the family has the means, a feast or all-out party ensues. Families in my small village don’t have the means to finance a big celebration, and my sister was no exception, so essentially the day was spent greeting women, sitting around the yard, drinking tea and passing the baby around.

We had a number of technical activities this week, starting with baby weighing on Monday. This was a practice run for us to get the hang of setting up the scales, organizing the moms, weighing the babies and giving nutritional advice. We expected to practice on a handful of moms, but two chaotic hours later we’d weighed 50 babies from the village! Mothers just kept showing up. While something so simple as weighing a child may seem to be a given in more developed places, it can be a lifesaver in places like Mali where child malnutrition is such a big problem and many mothers don’t necessarily always recognize the signs that their children aren’t getting enough nutrients. Thankfully, the majority of our babies were in the green zone, meaning at a healthy weight; but there were several yellows and even reds, indicating the need for doctor intervention. The weighing was mass chaos, but good practice for future projects.

uesday’s project was an ameliorated porridge cooking demonstration. In places where female literacy is low and women wouldn’t just be able to read a recipe given to them, a demonstration is a good way to get the point across. The porridge we were making is fortified with peanut and corn powder to help children on the borderline of malnourishment to gain weight rapidly, and it’s easy and inexpensive to make. What is harder is explaining things in Bambara. Thankfully, the women took over with the ingredients and generally knew what to do; our role was to emphasize why making the porridge was so important for the health of the kids. We ended the demonstration with women filling their own bowls with porridge to take home to their families.

On Wednesday, the focus was on animations, or informal “health talks” given to a group of people about a certain topic. Our group chose to focus on the importance of breastfeeding and appropriate weaning and nutrition for small children. We developed a short presentation in Bambara and created a game to test their knowledge on the topic, and brought it in front of a group of about 10 women. Generally it was well recieved–although this is an activity I will wait on until my language skills are pretty strong, as it’s hard to deal with questions that arise when you are still getting used to hearing and using the language.