Week 5:
Living, Learning, Sneezing

August 14, 2018

New Week New Projects

This has been a very full and fun week. I have had some additional projects added to my workload that included making new registers for village diabetes information, transferring recorded information from the original registers into a secondary register as well as digital excel sheets, searching for possible grant opportunities for CRHP, and modeling Helping Hands products for the new Etsy page. It was definitely a week full of mixed and matched projects, but the variety ensured it was never boring.

Why Diabetes Information?

CRHP was awarded a grant by the World Diabetes Foundation, and part of the fulfillment of that grant is diabetes education through community sessions and adolescent programs. Village Health Workers (VHWs) travel to project villages with the Mobile Health Team (MHT) and lead the sessions and educate the attendees. They use songs, puppet shows, and posters to explain how diabetes works, signs, symptoms, and treatments. A member of the Mobile Health Team records the pre-test results, the names of villagers who attend the sessions, marks if they are high risk or already an established diabetes patient, and then the MHT and the VHWs test the glucose levels of any diabetes patients present and anyone who is high risk. If they have a score below 80 or above 180, they are often advised to go to the hospital to undergo more tests.

When the MHT gets back to campus, I am given the village register and it is my job to transcribe information in the correct sheets. I record all people with glucose test scores into a lab register (even if they did not attend a session), and mark if they are a diabetes patient if their score is below 80 or above 180, or if they are pregnant. Then I enter the pre-test results into one sheet, and all the names of session attendees into another sheet along with which session they attended, and finally I count the total number of people who attended and how many of each were patients, had a family member who has diabetes, how many were high risk, and how many glucose tests were taken. All of this information is used to not only fulfill the requirements of the grant but to record progress as VHWs teach more sessions.

Processes and Practice

I spent the second half of my week looking into grants for CRHP. I asked the International Programs Manager (IPM) earlier in the week if we could sit down and talk about grants and grant writing because that’s something I am interested in pursuing after Cornell, so to start me off she gave me some guidelines and sent me to a site where I could start searching for applicable grants. I really enjoy scanning for keywords and checking off all the boxes; it feels like a treasure hunt because finding grants that we are eligible for is a time-consuming activity with few payoffs. I am learning a lot, and I am hoping that I can look more into grant writing soon.

The final big project this week was working on the Etsy page for Helping Hands! Helping Hands is a CRHP project that teaches women marketable skills such as sewing, and products made as a part of that program are sold on campus, and all profits go straight to the Julia Hospital, the hospital on campus. There are a multitude of products ranging from sandals to sari bags, pillowcases, scrunchies, scarves, and more. Because there are so many products available, the IPM thought an Etsy page to be used in the U.S. would be an effective way to sell more inventory. I wrote the descriptions for the products, but descriptions are useless if there aren’t pictures – which is how I became an Etsy model! I wore a variety of scarves, scrunchies, and sari bags while the IPM took pictures which was the highlight of my week (in a lot of the pictures my face is beet red because I was laughing so hard). It was an entertaining pastime and something that I did not think I would be a part of at this internship, or any internship really.

Minor Setbacks

As much as I was able to accomplish this week, I was sick with a throat infection for the better part of the week which made it difficult to focus and get work done. I’m not sure where I picked it up, but Shahabai (the campus nurse/VHW) took one look at me and knew exactly what was wrong, and I was given antibiotics later the same day; a benefit of living in close proximity to a hospital. I have never gone through a sickness as fast as I did here, and although it was no fun to feel so under the weather (I have never sneezed so much in a 24-hour period), I appreciated the speed with which I got better and the concern everyone had. All the VHWs and staff members who saw me asked me many times if I was okay and if I was better yet. It made being far from home easier.

Because I was sick I was unable to go to a community session in a village, but I plan on attending a few next week and probably the weeks following. I am still learning a lot and taking notes on how the skills I am using here can apply to my future. Working with data and numbers is an applicable skill in a lot of settings, and understanding how to simply and efficiently organize that information makes the process smoother. I am just starting to learn about grants, and I am excited to hopefully start practicing grant writing (if not while I’m still here then definitely afterward). This has been one of the slower weeks, but I still had a blast modeling, recording, and researching.