Big Bird

The area where I live in South Sudan is home to a great variety of birds. The kids on my team have actually formed a bird watching club called the PBC (Parot Bird Club), complete with handmade membership cards.

One of the more unique looking birds in our area is the fellow on the left, a marabou stork. Rather an ugly head, with no feathers. It's a scavenger, you see, like the vulture, and as Wikipedia says, "a feathered head would become rapidly clotted with blood and other substances when the bird's head was inside a large corpse, and the bare head is easier to keep clean."

The long pink tube hanging from the marabout's throat is called a gular sac. One of its uses is to make various noises during courtship rituals. 

The marabou stork is a massive bird; it can grow up to 5 feet tall and weigh up to 20 pounds. Large marabous can have a wingspan of more than 10 feet.

Last month there was a flock of marabous courting and building nests in a huge tree near the Samaritan's Purse base where we go to use the internet. It's quite impressive to see these huge birds perched on top of branches high up in the air.

The couple in the upper middle of the above photo were quite the luvvy-duvvy pair. They remained unperturbed and immobile, huddled together while the pair just above them were constantly in motion, with (I presume) the male coming and going in a flurry of wings.

"I'm the king of the castle!" For whatever reason, this fellow was perched alone on another tree.

Oops--a split second too late on the shutter! Bye for now. See you next year!

Childbirth Education Class

In late September I attended a week-long childbirth educator training in Nairobi offered by Giving Birth Lamaze Africa. This training was extremely practical and provided me with an excellent curriculum and great teaching aids to use to promote healthy pregnancies and good birth outcomes in my community.



I am teaching the material to the women above, who include my usual health group women, of which one is newly pregnant and another is a traditional birth attendant, joined by two other traditional birth attendants and an additional pregnant woman. We've been having a great time together. These women know a lot already because they have all given birth multiple times, and they are eager to learn more in order to teach and help other women and save lives in this region where the maternal and infant mortality rates are among the highest in the world.

Below are pictures of a lesson on nutrition during pregnancy. The group sorted various kinds of food and drink into three groups: 1) Eat/drink often--be sure to get enough; 2) Eat/drink, but not too much ; 3) Avoid. Then we discussed their choices and why each of the various foods and drinks were good for the woman and her baby or not. The man you see is one of the local pastors we partner with who is very interested in health. He was helping me by interpreting to and from Dinka.

Another lesson included content on the physical changes of the body during pregnancy and how they affect the pregnant woman (i.e. frequent urination, backache, etc). The women compared pictures of a non-pregnant and a pregnant woman and we discussed the differences between them. The group was very interested. One woman summed it up: "We've all experienced these things but we never knew why, what was going on inside our bodies."

I demonstrated to the women helpful positions for them to use during late pregnancy, for example for lifting something, reducing backache or helping the baby to move down. One suggested position for the latter is to sit cross-legged. Well, I found out that Dinka women never sit cross-legged (I hadn't thought about this, even though I had always seen them sit with their legs together); when I sat that way, they all burst out laughing. Then some of them tried to do it, which generated even more laughter. 

The next two pictures show women practicing arching and then releasing their back, which helps relieve lower back pain.

                            

When we talked about one of the Lamaze Healthy Birth Practices, avoid giving birth on your back, the women wanted to show me how they usually give birth at home, which is not on their back (yeah!). One of them got something to fill out her belly as if she were pregnant, then one of the traditional birth attendants pretended to be delivering the baby, with other women giving support from behind. Rather more hilarity going on here than during a real delivery!

Eager Learners

Last month saw the start of a Dinka literacy class for women from the church in my village, Parot. This is a pilot class; as we see how it goes, we will do some tweaking and hopefully expand to another church early next year, and more later in the year.

Fifteen women attend the class. It meets in the church four afternoons a week, from 3:00-5:00 p.m., and is taught by Peter Lual. Lual is a pastor-in-training and a teaching assistant at Cush Christian School (the primary school started last year in Parot by one of my teammates). Lual enjoys teaching the women and is impressed by how eager they are to learn.





 
Lual uses a primer and other materials that we obtained from the SIL International South Sudan branch. The materials use a number of different teaching strategies and methods, both "top-down" and "bottom-up." The top-down strategy is illustrated in the picture above: students learn to "read" a text by first listening as the teacher reads it while pointing to the words, then the teacher points and the students read it with him, and then individual students take turns reading it. They are basically memorizing the text, and their brain learns to associate the oral and the written words. In addition to reading stories from the primer, the class has been learning to read Bible verses and worship songs, which they really enjoy. They have learned what it's like to read a text fluently and that reading is meaningful and fun, and they can recognize many whole words.

The bottom-up strategy is illustrated above. The students systematically learn to read and write the letters of the alphabet, and they also learn to put letters and syllables together to make words. The latter is harder for most of them than learning how to recognize whole words.

The class takes a break mid-way through each lesson, but the women don't really take a break, they spend all the break time reviewing the stories they've been learning. It's encouraging to see how the stronger ones help the weaker, and how motivated they are to understand everything.

  

Fall, Aweil Style

We have some semblance of fall here this time of year. Leaves on some of the trees actually turn yellow and brown and drift down to the ground, making a nice, crunchy layer to walk in. The only thing is, my mind still can't reconcile this with our rather warm daily maximum temperatures of about 37 C/almost 100 F.  Without cool, fresh fall air, it's just not the same!

The Team

Here's a photo of the current members of my team, taken in September--when everything was still nice and green.

Harvesting Peanuts

The peanuts that were planted back in June on our compound were harvested a few weeks ago. Some of the local church folks came and did a "peanut picking bee" one Saturday, including a few of the boys who helped plant the peanuts, or, as we call them here, g-nuts (short for "groundnuts"). 

The groundnut plants are pulled out of the ground, then shaken to remove some of the soil sticking to them.

The g-nut field was just behind our guest house, where my teammates Laurie and Kathleen live. That's my house in the top centre of the picture.

 For the boys, one of the main attractions of this work is munching on the fresh peanuts.

The uprooted plants are stacked and left to dry.

Lord's Supper

Here are a few pix of the Lord's Supper at the Parot church two weeks ago. People go up to the front to take it. Pastor Karlo and Pastor John Alou were officiating. The juice and bread were prepared by the two church deacons, who are standing to the right of the pastors in the photo below.