Promoting the basics to save children
Pon Team is a 25-year-old mother in Cambodia’s Teuk Phos district. Her daughter Thairy was frequently sick with diarrhea when she was one year old,. Touch Sokya, a 24-year-old farmer’s wife in Teuk Phos, also struggled to keep her first-born healthy.
Team and Sokya’s cases are not unusual. Nearly 9 million children under five years old die every year worldwide, two out of three of these from easily preventable diseases like diarrhea and from conditions like malnutrition.
International Relief and Development (IRD) sent trainers into rural Cambodian villages to teach families the essentials of health and hygiene. Mothers, and some fathers, learn about the importance of early breastfeeding; the value of exclusive breastfeeding until six months of age; nutrition; the importance of using clean water and how to obtain it; and methods of proper hygiene.
Following IRD’s child health campaigns, there have been few cases of diarrhea in this village, and Team’s own child is healthy. Sokya began applying the lessons she learned from IRD prior to the birth of her second child. She proudly reports that she breastfed her son 30 minutes after giving birth. Her family now only consumes boiled and filtered water. She and her children wash their hands with soap. Her children have received all of their scheduled immunizations, regular vitamin A supplements, and deworming tablets at the local health center’s outreach campaigns. As a result, her younger child, now 14 months old, has never experienced diarrhea or vomiting.
Contributed by International Relief and Development