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!