Airdrop of Educational Materials to Communities on Lake Volta (Part 1)

We had scheduled Friday morning to do an airdrop of health education materials to some of the communities that we serve on the southern end of Lake Volta (yes, human-made lake with the largest surface area in the world).

The preparations for this drop started a few days before when the AvTech students started putting some text together for the educational materials. We had a session where we jointly composed the text for the health education poster. This is where the digital projector really came in handy as everyone could contribute and yours truly, the humble scribe, could just type out the really great ideas that the girls came up with. The resulting text was designed to appeal to the peers of our AvTech students who live in the remote villages near the lake. This target audience of young people has similar aspirations to those of our AvTech students – they all want to have good jobs when they finish school, and good health maintenance is an important part of this.

After printing out twenty copies of the different documents – a letter to the community leaders, some instructions for use of the materials, a small poster with practical health guidance of health, it was time to assemble the bags for the drop. For each community, the girls collated the documents, rolled them up inside a red marker sheet, and stuffed the roll into a plastic bag which was sealed using an office heat sealer. The plastic bag was sealed in two directions, so as to have one half of the bag flap in the wind as a kind of rudder so that the paper roll would drop on its side and not on one end and get creased.

Once we had the twenty packages prepared, all was ready for the bag drop flight the next morning