First impressions from Honde Valley
As promised in the last post, In this post I will dwell on reflections based on my interactions so far. Its been three weeks since I started internship, but not much happened in the first two weeks of my internship. I remained in the Bulawayo Office owing to some Grant logistics. At the end of my second week I travelled to the World Vision National Office to meet the Mutasa team.
So much has happened in my third week though. We have done a couple of field visits to support the Village Health Workers in their Positive Deviance Hearth sessions in the community. As we made the trips, I took time to check out the surroundings.
For a district with such high prevalence of stunting, one would expect the communities to be living in abject poverty or have easily identifiable problems. Unfortunately, that is not so of this small population. As we travel I realise that its all green around us, there are endless banana plantations, tea plantations and people by the road side selling bananas, avocados, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, madhumbe/ magogoya (an edible plant tuber) and naartjies. Then I start wondering how most of the under fives are stunted when their land can produce so much that they can even sell.
As I ask around, I am told that the land is not so good for cereals as well as rearing domestic animals. The best this community can do is concentrate on farming the crops that can survive the region`s weather, then they can sell excess produce so that they can buy maize and protein based relish. One then wonders, if they do buy the food components that they have to to balance their meals. That I will have to find out in the next few weeks.
There surely have to be more than meets the eye in this community.