Project Lokun

It is always heartwarming to be able to care for children! As the majority of our work takes place in schools within the various villages, part of our contribution to the people there is to provide a health screening session for their children attending the schools there. We aim to highlight several healthcare issues early enough and to educate the children on how to better take care of themselves. Our Health Screenings thus consist of:

Body Mass Index
It is always important to care for one’s nutrition! We hope to be able to collect data on the BMI (Weight for Age/ Height for Age / BMI for Age) of the students in each school that we visit. With these statistics, we hope that what we have gathered can highlight the need for aid to provide nutrition for these children to organisations and people who might be looking for an avenue to help. Sadly, from our previous trips we have found that according to WHO standards, almost all of the students suffer from various levels of malnutrition.

Anemia
Another target objective of our Health Screenings, is to identify students who suffer from Anemia. Nutrition plays a big role in ensuring the students have a good intake of Iron. Alhough this is very much lacking, we hope that by seeking out individuals with marked signs of Anemia, we can provide intervention by issuing Iron-Follate tablets. As we now visit the same schools biannually, we are able to give the students a prescription to last them at least 3-6 months before the next team arrives to carry out screenings again. They will then identify these students again and see if our intervention has removed the problem of a lack of iron intake, or if other investigations must be carried out.

Wounds / Hairlice / Scabies
It always brings us joy to be able to see children happy and enjoying themselves! (:  It is therefore one of the healthcare services we provide to the students, being able to help remove the several issues that hamper their fun! We aim to treat superficial wounds as best we can and send the students off with more dressings and tender instructions to keep them dry. Hairlice and Scabies are also sources of irritation to the children, so we give them a good lice-killing hairwash and issue more hair-lice shampoo and scabies bars home for the taking! Although it does not immediately solve hairlice problems at home, seeing the children feel clean (many hardly even wash their hair sometimes!!) and satisfied draws a warm feeling within our hearts.

Physical Examinations
As mentioned before, the aim of PE is for early detection of any possible complications the children might have. We target for Abdominal, Cardiovascular and Respiratory issues and will usually refer to our doctors at hand. Although we do not have any measures to treat, like our clinics we have referral systems to take care of any urgent or chronic diseases that we might spot.

And that sums up our Screenings for the children! We usually aim to try and see all the students in each school (some might even have up to 200-400 students!!), and as such our screening days are swamped with many to check out, but keeping in mind the good we hope to achieve with these young children, we steadfastly hold out and to treat each student with tender loving care! We welcome any form of comments or additional aspects of screenings we can add on to our current repertoire, so feel free to drop by with your thoughts!