Community involvment is critical

Submitted by Michaela Sholes

Things are never as simple as you might think... One of our goals within our efforts is to continually support the existing health infrastructure, and one of the ways we are doing this is by collaborating with as many local resources as possible. Since helping the young lady we mentioned some time ago, Ben and I have developed a good relationship with nurses at a local hospital. When the nurses became aware of our efforts on the lake, they helped us arrange a meeting with the head doctor to discuss potential collaboration. We had hoped to meet with him last week, but it was right around the Easter holiday and ended up needing to be moved to this week, but we managed to liase with the nurses about a good time to catch him in between rounds! Upon finally sitting down with him amidst all the people around clamoring for his attention, we shared with him our work on the airfield and in the communities and introduced the idea of including in our health packets posters from the hospital. Ideally, we would like to support the work of GHS by including their posters so that the messages and graphics are familiar to those in the communities. Although the doctor was very kind, we learned that before he can authorize the provision of any materials, we have another meeting to attend at the district level. So from here, Ben and I will try to schedule the necessary additional meetings and continue working for local support of the communities. Until then, I for one, really like the posters the AvTech girls made!