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Following up with this month's theme of health, this weeks blog is about mental health. Thanks to the generous grant from the Oficina Económica y Cultural de Taipei, it will be possible to run a full scale health program next year, which will also include a mental health component.

Not only physical health, but also mental health is a very important issue that HOOP would like to address in the community of Flora Tristan. HOOP will collaborate with the psychologist Marisol Pacheco Pacheco in the following year to implement this program. She is a very experienced psychologist, and already knows the community well.

HOOP volunteers are always happy to listen and give advice to the HOOP students and their moms, but they are not qualified to address issues concerning domestic violence or counselling for example. For that reason we are happy to have such an experienced psychologist on board now. During this past year Marisol already volunteered her time to run all kinds of monthly psychology sessions, but we are pleased to be able to extend these sessions to weekly sessions now.

Marisol during one of her psychology sessions

Written and photos by Charlette Voss

Clean water is not self-evident

The first thing I do in the morning is to go to the bathroom, wash my hands, brush my teeth, and then make a coffee or tea. For all of that I need water. It is an essential resource to start my day comfortably.

I can access water very easibly, but imagine you have to worry about access to clean, drinkable water every morning. In Flora Tristan the only water that is accessible, is contaminated water in various water stations throughout the community. None of the houses have water, so the families to need to walk to these stations to collect water. Contaminated water can cause health problems including Cholera, Hepatitis A, Typhoid Fever and Diarrhoea. The families we work with have to use this contaminated water every day, because authorities are not taking care of improving the quality of the water. That means, that the families need to boil the water every time before they use it for drinking or teeth brushing, in order to kill all the harmful bacteria.

At our school we use water filters that make tab water save to drink. Those filters also ensure that the kids learn the importance of clean water and how it can affect their life. For HOOP volunteers filtering water, is part of the class preparation. To carry the message of clean water to the whole community, HOOP´s health classes teach about the dangerous affects of contaminated water to the mothers as well as their children. Getting such filters though is a big expense that most families could not afford. Their only solution is to boil water which uses up a lot of fuel, so even boiling water is fairly expensive for most families.

HOOP would like to say thank you one more time to the Taiwanese Embassy. Through their generous grant we will be able to continue with medical treatment to the children affected by contaminated water, as well as hygiene classes which will help the children avoiding getting sick in the first case.

Written by Charlette Voss

Healthy Body - Healthy Mind

This month we will focus our media and blog posts on health. Since many of the families living in Flora Tristan have nutritional deficiencies and no access to health care, HOOP is organizing several nutrition and health workshops to learn about healthy diets and mental health. Seeing that it is easier to learn in action than from books, we have organized various workshops with the children and the moms this year. This way it is more certain that the ideas are also implemented on an every day basis in their private homes.

The workshops are informing the community about unhealthy drinks and how many spoons of sugar for example fit in just one small bottle of Inka Cola, amongst other things. Furthermore they get to know, what can happen to their teeth, if they do not keep up and follow through with their oral hygiene.

It is very important to HOOP that the community learns about healthy nutrition and health in general. This for example includes simple things like having three daily meals, because if the kids do not eat well, they can often not focus during class or achieve good grades. 

Since the workshops got initiated, there has definitely been an increase of the awareness towards health matters. For that reason we would like to extend our health program next year and are pleased to announce a partnership with the Taiwanese Embassy (Oficina Economica y Cultural de Taipéi) who kindly provided us with a generous grant to extend our program to include psycholgical support, nutrition classes, hygiene classes, health assessments and treatments. We would like to thank the Taiwanese Government for their generous support und we can`t wait to implement the program next year.

Our two Taiwanese volunteers Nicole and Nikky, the Taiwanese Ambassador Jaime Wu, and our staff members Ali and Tammy in the Taiwanese Embassy

Written by Charlette Voss