Nutrition Education is Important

I’m not sure the effects and extent of a lack of knowledge about nutrition in this area can be overstated. Once while out walking, Adrienne and I happened past a woman with a severely starved infant. We stopped and spoke with the woman encouraging her to bring the infant to the clinic (which was about a two minute walk away) for formula. Again, there is really no overstating how extreme this infant’s condition was. The woman said it was 9 months old; it was the size of a one month old. Everyone has seen photos of the starving babies in Africa, but it is incredibly disturbing to see a baby in this condition face to face. The baby’s eyes were protruding, the bones in the neck sticking out, the ribs protruding, the sagging skin around her hips where there was no fat surrounding her femur. She barely moved or held her head on her own. To make sense of this, we in the West usually tell ourselves that these people are so poor they cannot afford food or are so poor they want the child to die so they do not need to pay for its food or school or clothes. We learned from the mother that the child’s biological mother had died and the infant was left for this woman to care for along with four others. Watching the foster mother and grandmother interact with the child in the clinic it was very clear that they loved it. They knew she was ill, but I think they were genuinely unaware of how close to death the baby was. They were feeding it cornflakes. Which is shocking to hear, because it is so clear to us that an infant fed exclusively cornflakes would starve, but is even more shocking because cornflakes are the most expensive food available in Kabala. The family apparently had quite a bit of money available to buy food for the infant. Theresa spent some time with the mother and grandmother explaining how to prepare baby food from bananas, sugar, salt, and rice, and other techniques she had used to raise an orphaned infant herself. I am not sure how things progressed in this case, but hopefully the family believed Theresa. Without understanding the nutritional value of cornflakes verses the baby food, it is simply trust that would motivate them to prepare the food Theresa described. I believe they wanted cornflakes for the infant because as the most expensive food they must believe it to be the most healthy. I am sure it does not help that when radiantly healthy Westerners visit, we buy cornflakes religiously.