Rescue starving children Nepal

Our Nutritional Rehabilitation Homes for severely malnourished children continue to restore hundreds of infants and toddlers to good health each year and to educate their mothers about nutrition and good child care practices. We now have six of these facilities scattered throughout the country. The main one in Kathmandu, which serves as a training and support center for all the others, is funded largely by the generosity of the dZi Foundation in Colorado. The capable and devoted staff has perfected the art of training illiterate young mothers in good child care practices.

This year, we will add three new facilities in remote parts of Nepal, some of which were inaccessible during the years of the Maoist insurgency. This is to serve the large number of mothers who cannot come to Kathmandu with their starving children. We are also starting a pilot program of nutrition camps in isolated areas. This will involve sending teams of medical personnel and nutritionists to examine the local children, show the mothers and other relatives of the children how to prepare nourishing supplements made of locally available foodstuffs, and refer very malnourished children to the nearest NRH for rehabilitation. Then we will conduct two follow-up camps to assess the effectiveness of our approach. Such a program is much needed, since half the children younger than five years of age are malnourished, and this is a leading cause of death among this age group.

Nepal is a country of strong traditions, and these include traditions about child rearing. We have found that mothers we have trained in good child care methods at the NRH are sometimes unable to practice them when they return to their villages because the matriarch of the house – the mother-in-law – insists that traditional (and sometimes harmful) customs be followed. For this reason, our camps will also focus on educating the mother-in-laws who have such a powerful influence over the rearing of children.

Because this letter would not be complete without a few pictures of the thousands of children the NRH has restored to health, please see the links below.

To restore a malnourished child to blooming good health costs about $250, which includes an average of five weeks of hospitalization and training the mother in good child care practices to be sure that the problem does not recur.

Links:

• Nutritional Rehabilitation Homes
• Proof of our work
• How the NRHs operate

Pictures:

• Amar Before (JPG)
• Amar After (JPG)
• Ashwara Before (JPG)