Prevention CHE - 4 Greatest Hits

Geoffery shows us the "dam" he built to save water for
his animals in the dry season.

Let's stick with the metaphor from my last post, that CHE is like a water tower, and the first leg that makes it stand is "Development not Relief."  Then the next leg that CHE can’t stand without is the idea that “Prevention is Better than Cure.”

What it is: Geoffrey is a 30-something man from the Masai tribe, who are known for hanging on to their distinctive traditions of cattle herding and other peculiarities longer than all the tribes around them in Kenya. But he is distinctive that when another local man who had heard of CHE shared it with him, he took to the idea very quickly of helping his people develop like this. But when we visited his house, we didn’t see any evidence of flashy businesses or foreign projects. Instead we found he’d been taking the last 3 or 4 years to make a healthy home which some of his neighbors have started emulating. The CHE idea of a “healthy home” means to focus on 6-10 key characteristics of a home that isn’t hospitable to illness but encourages growth. Then to see how many of those characteristics you can develop simply by learning and applying local solutions. 

Geoffrey’s biggest project was building a rough wood and wire fence around his homestead. This keeps out animals and animal waste, casual thieves, windswept garbage, and allows for more concentrated efforts inside. He also has spent a long time planting trees as he’s learned that taking care of the environment is healthier for humans in the long run and a sign of honoring God. He’s made a wooden outhouse with wash room to contain human waste and provide for washing hands that keep contaminates out of food and mouths. He’s build a “dry” dam to collect run-off water during the rainy season for crops and animals for the next 5 months. Perhaps the biggest thing was his realization that a healthy home is one where the whole family has reasonable education. In addition to finding the best schools to send his kids to, he also sent his wife back to school (away from the family) for two years to get her high-school equivalency and now she’s become a local primary teacher. All these seemingly small efforts are on their way to making a huge change.

What it isn’t: Highly trained doctors seeing 150 patients a day, half of whom could have been treated by a nurse at a local clinic, at home with simple medicine, or simple techniques that could have prevented the problem in the first place. Local education, mobilization, and simple practices are the heart of avoiding the likelihood of problems before they need to have expensive treatment or “cures.”

Take away: Prevention goes hand in hand with a development mentality that works on making the situation better by teaching better practices that people can really use to avoid problems. It's much cheaper and less labor intensive in the long run to prevent likely problems. This also helps free up the resources that do need to be spent on “cures,” “treatments,” and larger-scale infrastructure for things that aren’t so preventable. One of the most difficult parts of prevention is helping people buy-in to a more long-term way of thinking and planning, even in places that see so much volatility that usually destroys savings and planning.

-- El Padre