Last week, the Project Muso team held a workshop on nutrition. We focused this workshop on early childhood nutrition, nutrition for pregnant mothers, and nutrition for breastfeeding mothers and children. The results of the workshop are exciting: together, our team of Health Educators, educators, and health professionals created a Bamanankan language guide for training Moishe Health Promoters in crucial nutrition skills, which can save the lives of many children here in Mali.  Over the next two months, Moishe Community Health Promoters will be training in these skills, practicing them in their families, and sharing them with their communities.

The process of making this guide was awesome to witness and an honor to participate in. Dr. Ichiaka Koné and pharmacology intern Fousseini Traoré led and facilitated the workshop, bringing information on the best nutrition practices and skills in the world, as well as their own medical experiences treating children in Mali with malnutrition.

And yet what transpired was nothing like a lecture. Ichiaka and Fousseini came with critical nutrition information and skills to teach. But great information is not enough.  To teach these health skills effectively, they need to be explained in the local language, Bamanankan, not in French or in English, and they need to be explained using terms and examples that mothers in the community can relate to. Most importantly, the training needs to take into account the challenges that women face every day trying to feed their family well in amidst conditions of extreme poverty. How can a family of ten eat healthily if you only have $4 to feed them for the entire day?  A good training in nutrition takes these conditions into account and provides practical skills and knowledge that enable women to overcome these barriers and provide the best nutrition possible to their families. No one is better equipped to do this then Project Muso’s Health Educators. They are women from the communities in which we work, so they came to the nutrition workshop with the skills and wisdom to translate complex concepts of nutrition into terms, examples, and phrases in the Bamanankan language that mothers in the community will be able to understand and apply.

Working through each part collaboratively, the team was able to create a guide that no single member could have created alone.