The First Mega-Modules

Where do you begin, when your goal is to teach about "Infectious Diseases", or "Women's Issues", "Nutrition", or "Musculoskeletal Issues"?
That's why I called them "MEGA-modules"!

Ladies first. We got about 30 female staffers together and reviewed anatomy, the menstrual cycle. We discussed some of the common conditions that village women have to deal with, and also about family planning. Magically, my whiteboard drawings turned out really well. The field staffers asked questions that led to great discussion about things like Kegel's excercises (moola banda!) and we of course laughed a LOT. It was really fun. I think the whole trip to India was validated when someone said, "Madame, I've had 3 babies, and never knew what was happening in my body until you just explained it."

The nutrition module was also great. The posters I found in Hyderabad were really useful, as was information I got from the Weston A. Price Foundation website http://westonaprice.org (sorry I tried doing links for all the sites in this post but none of them worked!). We started off talking about macronutrients and micronutrients. What they are, what they're good for, and what the good sources of them are. I really emphasized food sources over supplements, which inevitably leads to political issues. Especially issues of food safety and food security, which happens to be the name of the class I'll be taking in October at Navdanya. More blogging about that in the future, I'm sure, but for now, I'll give the example of vitamin A.

Here in India, Vitamin A deficiency has been a huge problem in certain regions, and it's notorious for causing vision problems, even permanent blindness from scarring of the cornea. This is almost incomprehensible given that India is the land of the mango, and there's tons of papayas, too. Some of the most vitamin A rich foods around! Interventions have consistently been to give vitamin A supplements, but this can backfire, as it did with the UNICEF campaign in the state of Assam in 2001. Dozens of children actually died, probably because of accidental overdose.

Vitamin A toxicity is nearly impossible to reach if you're getting it from FOOD sources (unless you're really overdoing it on the polar bear pate). So, it seems to me, if international and governmental organizations really wanted to do the right thing, they'd make sure everybody has access to mangoes or papayas or eggs... basically, the variety of foods that people need to stay healthy.

Instead, they seem to be doing just the opposite. The diet in India, and elsewhere in the world, is becoming increasingly impoverished, with people abandoning traditional foods that are highly adapted to growth conditions in this area. In India there are dozens of varieties of millets and sorghums like ragi, jowar, bajra. These traditional foods almost invariably are SO much higher in nutritional content (protein, iron, calcium, etc). They're also delicious, but they don't play so well in the international market.

It's hard to find these grains in India now, because farmers face all kinds of pressures (mostly from the government responding to international trade bodies) to grow "Green Revolution" cash crops of... white rice and wheat. ONLY, white rice and wheat. Now that's where people here get most of their calories, but those foods don't supply nearly enough protein, healthy fats, or micronutrients!

For folks who get really excited learning about this stuff like I do... I found some provocative articles about this in the Hunger issue of The Little Magazine http://www.littlemag.com/hunger/index.htmland at the India Together website http://www.indiatogether.org/. Also, the Nutrition Foundation of India http://nutritionfoundationofindia.res.in/nutrition.asp
has listings of nutritional content of the common foods in India, as well as some other interesting publications.

These "Green Revolution" crops are also wreaking havoc with the indigenous social systems and the indigenous ecology. Every week there's another article in the newspaper about a farmer suicide. There have been thousands of farmer suicides across India in the past few years, but especially in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab. Pointedly, the most common method is by drinking the pesticides that the "Green Revolution" crops are so dependent on. The price of the hybrid seeds, the pesticides and the fertilizers is what has put these farmers into hopeless debt in the first place. Vandana Shiva writes passionately about this at http://navdanya.org/news/04july15.htm.

Getting back to health issues, the use of synthetic fertilizers and heavy irrigation on these crops also messes with the mineral content of the soil, so in some areas in India the soil is deficient in necessary minerals, and in other areas, toxic levels of accumulate. The petrochemical fertilizers add only NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium), but organic fertilizers and COMPOST replete the whole spectrum of necessary micronutrients, along with providing lots of other benefits to the soil. Organic fertilizers have been used on these fields for THOUSANDS of years, keeping the soils rich and productive, and keeping the foods grown on them full of the nutrients necessary for humans. It's the industrial chemical fertilizers along with the Green Revolution crops that have recently come in and messed with the minerals. I'm going on about all this COMPOST stuff because it plays a big role in the next module... (and cause I love compost!)

BREDS has been involved in some projects promoting kitchen gardens (or nutrition gardens, as I like to call them) with some successes and some challenges. We explored this idea again, in the context of nutrition, and Gandhian ideals of garam swaraj and swadeshi (self sufficiency and sovereignty). The field staffers were energized to do more work in this area in the future, and I hope the next AJWS volunteers are also interested in pursuing it.

Staffers also brought up a lot of questions that the villagers commonly ask them. There are lots of misconceptions about what foods are healthy for pregnant and nursing women, or for babies when they reach 6 months and are ready to add solid foods to their breastmilk diet. There are lots of beliefs about how food variety needs to be restricted for these groups. It was great to build their confidence in answering these questions with common sense responses. Some of the ideas passed down from Grandma are really wise, but some are like the pot roast story.... we can use our own judgement to decide what's best for our families.

So this leads to what was probably the most important point of the nutrition module. Repeatedly studies show that the most consistent correlation with good family nutrition is NOT (as you would think)
* How much food is produced in a country. Nor is it
* How rich the country is (REALLY, this does not correlate as consistently as...)
The best way to ensure that families are well fed, is to make sure Mom is well educated. There are lots of reasons for this, and the field staffers had lots of insights. Basically, an educated, empowered woman has the tools to feed her family better. It was a really lively discussion among all the staffers, male and female.

Well, that was a long entry, and I've got two more modules to go. Now I get a weekend off to rest my voice. The newspaper had an article about 4 village women getting beheaded -- a young boy got sick and died and his father decided these ladies are witches, and caused the death of his son, so he got together a group of men and cut their heads off. Another article about Naxalites setting off bombs on the road outside of Vizag. I feel so mournful for those people, and so grateful for the peace in my life.