Is this news?

Last week I had a brush with fame when an Indonesian Television station was in town to highlight the current crisis of malnourished children in Flores.  They were here to film a couple of mother and baby clinics to show what the government was doing to try and combat the issue and then visit a few families with severely malnourished children to attempt to illustrate the scale of the problem.

After they had finished filming at one clinic, I found myself chatting with the crew about what my activities were and some of my frustrations regarding the somewhat reactive approach of the government.

For example, we currently supply the families of severely malnourished (gizi buruk) children with a supplementary food parcel meant to last one month and those children who are merely undernourished (gizi kurang), one for 15 days.  The food parcel contains eggs, rice, vegetables, sugar, milk, fish, cooking oil and salt,  all weighed to a precise amount deemed optimal for these children.  This approach can and does sometimes achieve the desired effect, namely some severely malnourished children's weight increasing so that they become merely undernourished and some undernourished children moving to  a 'normal' weight.  But what normally happens when the 30 or 15 days comes to an end is that the child slips back into a dangerous weight decline.  We are only ever treating the problem once we have an almost emergency situation, rather than having a more proactive approach to combating the occurrence in the first place that runs parallel so that over time, less and less parcels are needed and that as an intervention they are seen as an exception rather than the norm.

The issue of nutrition certainly isn't one of just health and therefore to overcome the problem of malnutrition requires a multidimensional solution including improved  education,  involvement of the farming, agricultural lobby amongst other departments, availability of nutritious food so people have choice and also  a change in attitude and behaviour of the community about the importance of giving children a healthy diet.

At the end of our chat, the interviewer then asked whether he could interview me about the things I had just mentioned,  but this time on camera!  It was a great opportunity to say my piece and hopefully highlight the need for a more integrated approach to tackling malnutrition, that is of course if anyone could understand my Indonesian.

None of this is easy, nor do I profess to have all the answers to what is a very complicated solution, I am just doing what I can from my position in the health department.  Has there been a positive benefit from my work here? I believe there has been.  Will there be another malnutrition crisis this year in Sikka? Unfortunately,  I don't doubt it for a moment.