Engage Project Schistosomiasis

This is Amee and I when we got of our flight in Kenya before making our way to Shirati, Tanzania

Published June 10, 2013, last updated on October 5, 2017 under Voices of DGHI

By Phil Reinhart

Habari zenu?! How is everyone?! Amee, and I are undergraduate students at Duke, and we will be posting on this blog from Shirati, Tanzania for the next 8 weeks. We are working with Village Life Outreach Project (VLOP) Inc. and the Shirati Health, Education, and Development (SHED) Organization to facilitate education in three villages near Shirati about a neglected tropical disease, schistosomiasis or schisto for short. Last October, VLOP did a drug campaign for school-aged children to treat for schisto, but because of some reason that we cannot be sure of, they were only able to obtain informed consent from fewer parents than they had hoped. VLOP and the health committees in each of the villages, Roche, Nyambogo, & Burere, recognize the likely possibility of misperceptions and misunderstandings about schisto in the villages, which goes back to why we are here to work with the community leaders to clear-up the confusion.

Amee and I are hoping that by the end of our 8 weeks, we will have learned everything we can about schisto in the Shirati community, and that the community, especially community leaders have all of their questions answered and uncertainty cleared about schisto. Also, we are hoping to work with the community leaders to formulate a sustainable plan to educate the community about schisto and to inform them of the next drug campaign that VLOP is hoping to have in October. Amee and I are hoping that with the work of the community leaders and ourselves, there will be a 70-90% increase in informed consent and participation in the coming drug campaign.

Before we start blogging beyond this post, Amee and I would like to say thank you to Lysa Mackeen, our mentor. We have spent the past 4-5 months working on this project, and she has given us a wide range of advice and resources. I think both Amee and I look up to her for a lot of our questions, but she always pushes us to figure 'it' out ourself. She is incredibly experienced and intelligent, and we could not have asked for a better mentor. We cannot wait to stay in touch with her and keep working with her in the future. Also, we would like to thank Dr. Chris Lewis, Marcie Warrington Gould, the CEO of VLOP, and Richard Elliot, the former CEO of VLOP, for helping pull this project together. In advance, we would like to thank Dr. Esther Kawira and The Graham Family for mentoring us while we attempt to carry out our project. Lastly, I would like to thank DukeEngage and Amee would like to thank the Duke Career Center for funding our time in Tanzania. That is all for now! Keep a look out for our posts in the coming days! Good-bye! Tutaonana!

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