Former Beneficiaries of Community Therapeutic Care

Concern has been implementing a new approach to the feeding of severely malnourished infants with the help of the British NGO Valid International. In the southern area of Weylita, Concern set up a feeding programme in the sub-district of Offa. Throughout a period of several months, Concern responded to food shortages with a combination of general food rations, supplementary feeding and CTC.

Concern’s CTC programme is coming to a close at the time of the visit in December 2003. A total of 9 children are still enrolled in the OTP in Ayekina.

Former CTC-1
Markabe Yagiso  is 2½ years old. She was discharged from Concern’s feeding programme two weeks earlier. We visit her and her family in the small village of Yagiso Yango.

Markabe’s family has ten members in total; her parents, her grandmother, an orphaned niece and five siblings. Markabe suffered from oedema, brought on by malnutrition. She was found in this condition by a Concern outreach worker who brought her into the programme. The family of Markabe is very poor, they have little land and a lot of mouths to feed. The hygiene of the family is not very good, the outreach worker observes as we arrive at the family home. Several of the children suffer from diarrhoea again, including Markabe, who looks like she has lost some weight since he last saw her.

Markabe’s father explains that three of his children were in supplementary feeding and Markabe was both in OTP and later on receiving supplementary. “My family is affected by hunger every year, the rains come at different times, sometimes too much, sometimes too little, the harvests are not like they were when I was little. We have so many children that it is hard to keep them all fed. We try our best. Look, these four cows are not ours, but we look after them. When they are sold, we get part of the profit at a reward for fattening them up. We also have a goat, it was the offspring of several goats we looked after. If Concern had not looked after our child she may have died. We were considering selling the goat to buy food, but the prices in the market were low and we were not sure if she was sick or just hungry.”

As we say goodbye the outreach worker arranges to come back the next day. “I think we will readmit Markabe tomorrow, we cannot let her loose weight like this again, it’s better she gets readmitted now, before she gets in a worse condition again.”

Former CTC-2
Meskaram Simon is 2 years old. She was discharged from OTP today. We visit her family home to see where she comes from. Meskaram’s family is from Yagiso Yango, which is an hours’ walk from the OTP site in Ayekina. Meskaram’s parents Simon Yoba and Ayelesh Aysa are both around 45 years old and have seven children. They care for the two children of their eldest daughter, who lives next door but cannot look after her children because she is paralysed. Polio, explains Concern’s outreach worker quietly.

“Meskaram was vomiting and had diarrhoea before she was admitted into the programme. She lost a lot of weight in a short time. She was treated for her infections when she was admitted [most children in CTC are gives a general antibiotic because it has been proven that most carry  a number of infections that slow down or inhibit their recovery], and she was much better within a week.  She was given the same packages [Plumpynut] of food for ten weeks and look at her now, doesn’t she look great?”

The father Simon expresses his gratitude to the Concern outreach workers, one of who is keen to stress the success of CTC. He asks Simon what he had thought if his daughter had been sent to Gasuba for the same ten weeks and if his wife had gone with her. “That would have been fine too”, he first responds, “but who would have done the cooking for us?” When I suggest that he might have done it himself, the whole family bursts out laughing. “A mam doing the cooking, that’s unheard of. When asked who would do it instead Simon agonises for a while and then points to his eldest daughter Hanna; “Hanna, she would have done the cooking.”

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