Tungan Magajiya, Update January 2007

This is a report from Tungan Magajiya in Nigeria. Phillips Elisha, National Director, along with Lucky Simon and Doris Latayo Batari, Regional Coordinators follow up with villages throughout Nigeria to follow up on the initial Community Discussions. You can read more about the Village Care Program and community discussions at www.villagecare.com.

January 24, 2007

The excitement from the last training in Tungan Magajiya has not died down completely...Most of their approaches are community based, while that is commendable I asked them to also pay attention to home practices. The sanitation committee is nursing some seedling for different kinds of fruits to distribute to the community so that they will have enough fruits for nutrition purposes. They also had a meeting last Saturday with pastors, community leaders, and pig owners to discuss ways in which pigs will be stopped from roaming the streets.

Mrs. Nuhu and her team in Tungan Magajiya organized and taught people how to keep their environment clean, talked about the need to bathe children, and even went to the place where they take water and made sure the community worked together to separate where they wash, bath, and drink from. She also taught them the importance of cutting their nails, keeping and sweeping their homes, the significance of immunizing the children etc. Mrs. Comfort has also planted seedlings to help provide the community with some basic fruits. The women on economic security have taught women how to make beads for commercial purpose and how to package them and they are launching out big this year

Two homes for sure are practicing the outcomes and practices at some degree and they are experiencing results of good health, rashes disappearing from children and the like.

Some missionary team living outside Tungan Magajiya through the pastor of Chapel of Grace Church has taught them how to use the outcomes and practices in their homes and mission outlets and the whole small community is transformed. But most of all is that the principal of the Bible College has mandated all his students to do all the practices and confessed that before this most of his students were seen in the hospital for one illness or the other, especially malaria but now, in his words, the students have dropped going to hospital by 40%. He relocated the school latrines, away from their wells and borehole. He reorganized a lot of structures to make allowance for a clean environment and introduce a compulsory school sanitation program. This is not the end but that he is perhaps doing it more than any one else in his home with amazing results. The washing of hands is a must in the school.

What is more? Lucky, Doris, and I are very religious about this. The going is slow but certainly steady. We want to be an example.