The First 100

The first batch of 100 drops using the new poster set was collated and bagged today. Lydia is on light

duties and was there to ensure all packs were set ready for deployment.

If we only affected change in 5 people in each drop village we would be changing 5000 lives this year. We believe that the impact is far greater.

One thing is certain. .. and that is the changes in the lives of those who make up the packs from the Avtech Academy programme.

Healthcare drops.. now with style...

We have now received the poster packs for the next set of drops. Here is a selection being admired by
Patricia and Lydia as they prepare to return to Ghana after Lydia's surgery.

Massive thanks to Joerg and his team for an excellent production.

We expect to reach over 200 000 people with air drops in 2013.

Thank you all for your amazing support and working with us to change lives sustainably, one flight and one person at a time!

 

The new drop programme contains a special personal message from Patricia printed on the back of the Wolfpack poster. .. it reads. ..

Dear Community Members

My name is Patricia Mawuli, I come from a village just like yours, in the Volta Region. One day, six years ago, I was working collecting firewood when I heard an aeroplane overhead. I traced that aeroplane to a small airfield in the Eastern Region where the people were concerned about health and education. Their team is called Medicine on the Move, and I now lead Ghana's air-drop outreach with them. Today, we are reaching out to your community.

I learned to build aircraft, install aircraft engines and maintain them. I, along with other Ghanaian girls, built the aircraft that dropped this package to your community - and I flew the mission to drop this message to you personally. This very package has been prepared by young women from communities just like yours!

Today, I hope that this message and the accompanying posters will inspire you as a community to do many new things. I hope that you will use these posters in your schools and in your community health education programmes. I have a few things to ask of you all:

1. Please enrol your children when they are young, and keep your children in school, and remember the girl children must go to school too. Our children are the future. Education is important. I know, I have used my education to be able to reach you with this message today.

2. Please make sure that you do not allow people to urinate and defecate in or near water sources. Please use latrines - it really will help to reduce infections and disease. Make sure that latrines do not flood and spread disease.

3. Please do not bathe directly in the lakes and rivers. Try to reduce the risk to you and your family of the diseases spread in the waters around you.

4. Please remember to filter or boil water before you drink it. So many people are getting sick from using  non-safe water.

5. Please keep your communities clean. We see the rubbish around your communities as we fly over. If possible, establish some sort of community waste management. Where possible, and without causing risk of fire to homes or fields, burn your rubbish (borla) on a regular basis. Rubbish around your homes is a health risk - keep your community clean.

6. Please include meat, fresh vegetables and fruit in the diet of your family - it is important for your health.

7. Please reduce the malaria risks to your families by reducing the breeding places and use a mosquito net over your bed to reduce the number of mosquito bites that can spread the disease. If you or your children get malaria please get suitable treatment early - remember malaria kill many people every day.

8. Mothers, please feed your babies with breast milk for at least the first 6 months, and if possible for up to 2 years as a supplement. Your breast milk helps to protect your babies and make them strong.

9. Please take washing of your hands seriously. Wash your hands with soap and clean water after handling money, going to the toilet and before cooking or eating - and before feeding your children. Dirt on your hands can make your babies very sick - even dirt that you cannot see. Please wash your hands well.

We hope that this message will help you to help improve your community, keeping your children strong, healthy and well educated. We send this message of care and encouragement, and hope that you will find a use for the materials we give to you freely. We wish your community health, education and great future. Please take care of each other and your home.

Patricia Mawuli and the young women from Medicine on the Move

Kpong Airfield, Eastern Region, Ghana

Getting there....

Here we see a built in Ghana CH701 aircraft en-route to a health education drop run in the Afram Plains, flown by Patricia Mawuli. Early morning mist can be seen rising from the lush Volta Region vegetation below. This aircraft can remain airborne for more than 12 hours, with a range of over 1,600km, but most importantly it is taking much needed educational materials to communities far from the paved roads, touching lives with inspiration and a clear demonstration of Ghanaian determination and ability to change lives, positively and sustainably, through the use of engineering and aviation. Photo courtesy of Rex Pemberton. Aircraft built and maintained by WAASPS Ltd www.waasps.com and mission flight co-ordinated by Medicine on the Move www.medicineonthemove.org - Medicine on the Move is currently seeking sponsorship to expand its health drop operations, planning to drop around one thousand health packages in 2013.

Hi Tech Drops

Madame Confidence explains
drops to the teachers

Even with all the people we have involved in preparing the drop materials, some of the best ideas still come from the people themselves. On our recent drops to the Afram Plains, the School Headmaster Ben asked me if we ever drop anything besides paper materials. He was specifically interested in having us drop video lessons for his students that the AvTech Academy has made: Ghanaians teaching Ghanaians! Dropping CDs or DVDs would not work well due to the delivery methods, but if we had a donation of 1000 USB flash drives the possibilities would be endless. Of course this delivery method would not work for all rural communities since most are without power, but those along the main roads in the Afram Plains do have power, even if it is intermittent. Ben indicated that video lessons and education materials will leave a more lasting and meaningful mark on his students when compared to written materials.

Ben the Headmaster

Supplementing the regular drop posters with this hi tech solution might just be one more step in the right direction for us. Yes we will need to test delivery methods and ensure survivability of the materials. Yes we need to try and find funding to support this new drop method. Yes it means we need to spend more time preparing video materials for the communities But in the long run, if it provides for better retention and better understanding of the necessary health education, then we will all come out as winners at the end. Some of the best ideas come from the communities themselves, maybe you can help Ben see his wish come true.

World Aids Day

1st December is World Aids Day. Fortunately, world wide awareness and treatments are on the increase. Sadly, in many parts of the world HIV/AIDS continues to ruin lives.

Kpong Airfield lies just a few kilometres from the reported highest levels of the disease in Ghana.

Clearly, changing behaviour is key to reducing infections. We continue to fly regularly near schools and villages, waving to the young and not so young alike, working to change lives and perceptions on every flight we make.

We are told that the young women in these communities are inspired when they see our aircraft, built by african girls, flying overhead, and that it is changing perceptions, and behaviours.

Next year, after the harmattan, we are working towards a health education drop related directly to HIV/AIDS, and to find a monitoring process to establish the levels of behavioural change that our air drops are having.

Airdrop of Educational Materials to Communities on Lake Volta (Part 2)

On Friday morning, the day after the AvTech students completed the packages for the airdrops, Jonathan (our intrepid pilot) and I set out to fly over seventeen villages close to the shores of Lake Volta. I squeezed into the cockpit along with the bag of packages, taking care not to let anything fall into the opening in the floor.

The procedure was to fly towards a designated drop zone – usually at a school – and descend as far as needed but consistent with safety. The flight had been announced to the national security authorities as well as to air traffic control, and we were authorized to descend to 200’ feet above ground level. This is easier said than done, as the pilot needs to aim the aircraft very carefully while keeping a watch for emergent trees and other obstacles. On a turbulent day, this can become all the more challenging!

As we got close to the drop zone, I would hold a bag with the rolled up document in the hole in the floor, and release it when Jonathan called out “3, 2, 1, drop”. Some of the drop zones were difficult to identify, and they would come up very rapidly, but the bag had to be dropped in exactly the right location. With practice, the ‘dropmaster’ can identify the edge of a drop zone through the opening in the aircraft and it should fall exactly in the right spot.

When nearby children heard the sound of the aircraft, they would run out into the clearing, knowing that an airdrop was imminent and they would run to catch the bag. Meanwhile, Jonathan, would bring the aircraft into a climbing turn that allowed us to verify that the children were looking for bag, and we could sometimes see that they had actually found it.

We dropped the literature at 17 villages, dropping two bags in one village to serve another nearby community. For this trip, we flew a total of 1.3 hours in a Zenith 701 aircraft with the new Rotax 912iS engine.

This was my first time to participate in an airdrop run to the ‘client’ villages of Medicine on the Move, and I was thrilled not only by the opportunity see the villages, but also by the beautiful landscape and cloud formations. At the same time, I was very conscious of the living conditions of the people living in the villages, and saw many areas (including dwelling houses and fields) that had been flooded. This flooding came about because all the rains had raised the level of Lake Volta, and of course people like to live close to the water so that they can get to their fishing grounds, their drinking water and their washing water.

These conditions are a key reason why there is a need for education around health and hygiene. Water-borne diseases such as bilharzia (Schistosomiasis) are a key cause of poor health, while diarrhoea resulting from poor hygiene practices is widespread and debilitating.

Medicine on the Move first established contact with this batch of villages in early 2012 by making an initial invitational air drop. Almost all the villages responded positively to participating in the airdrop program by calling a special phone number (this batch of villages do have reasonable cellphone access, even if they have to walk to a location to get a call out! This may not be the case in future drop areas). There were some requirements placed on this group of villages such as participation in a preparatory meeting, but the key is that the community leaders are engaged and that some of these leaders – especially school teachers – are willing to use the airdrop materials to help raise the level of health and hygiene awareness in their communities. We’re certainly making an impact on the children – you can see their excitement from a couple of hundred feet up in the air when they run to pick up the airdrop bag!

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

Back to school

Next week we will recommence drop runs in Upper Manya Krobo. We decided to refrain from drops during the school vacation, since the usual drop zone is a school park!

The first drops will be for the schools. We plan to include some aviation based learning materials and some 'aviation health facts', making this drop more 'fun' than previous ones.

What would you put into a 'rural school start of academic year fun drop pack?'

We will be preparing these on Wednesday to drop at the at end of the week.

Home grown solutions

As we get ready to recomence the bag drops, once children are back in school, we have streamlined our fueling systems. The drum cradle allows single handed unloading of fuel drums ready to pre-filter the 95 RON/91 AKI fuel using a teflon coated water and dirt separation screen ready for use in the mission aircraft.