Today was our first day at the farm working. We started out touring the farm and all the different departments and projects New Horizons is working on. The have Eggs for Africa, Mozambique Fresh Eggs, and a new project involving crocodiles! We went in to see all the chickens and even got to collect some eggs. We then went to where the crocodiles were and they had about 250 babies! They had trained them to eat and take it into the water to swallow their food, pretty cool. One thing I thought was kinda funny was that we had to use our "inside voices" that way we didn't stress out the crocs. We were all whispering and taking pictures of them, one of the workers was actually trying to show us one and dropped it at our feet!
After that we broke for lunch and then started working on our specific projects.
So a little about what my specific project I'm working on.. I am on a team with a couple girls working to find out what nutrients the people here are deficient in and how healthy they are. We ask them a survey that goes into detail about how many times they eat a certain food per week and then ask them to measure out how much they would use to make one meal. We take body measurements such as height, weight, and upper arm circumference to determine how healthy or malnourished they are.
Once we got back to the hotel we ate dinner and all got together for a group talk. Dr. Nalley likes to get us together most nights and asks us a pretty diverse or philosophical question to get us really thinking. Tonights discussion was actually pretty intense. We found out that with a certain amount of money, Malaria can actually be completely wiped out of Africa. I had no idea of this. Theres not many problems in life that throwing money actually can solve them, but this one actually can be. The question for the night was, why doesn't America just fund to get malaria wiped out here? 1 days worth of pay at the Pentagon could pay for the entire country to be malaria free. Pretty eye opening.
I've always been aware that malaria kills people but not really knew the intensity of it until I got here. If it doesn't get treated within the first 3 days most people will die. Malaria is not something that should be treated lightly. I just wish I had all the money in the world to help this poor country out. I hope I can help raise some awareness about this because I personally had no idea how big of a problem it is!
After that we broke for lunch and then started working on our specific projects.
So a little about what my specific project I'm working on.. I am on a team with a couple girls working to find out what nutrients the people here are deficient in and how healthy they are. We ask them a survey that goes into detail about how many times they eat a certain food per week and then ask them to measure out how much they would use to make one meal. We take body measurements such as height, weight, and upper arm circumference to determine how healthy or malnourished they are.
Once we got back to the hotel we ate dinner and all got together for a group talk. Dr. Nalley likes to get us together most nights and asks us a pretty diverse or philosophical question to get us really thinking. Tonights discussion was actually pretty intense. We found out that with a certain amount of money, Malaria can actually be completely wiped out of Africa. I had no idea of this. Theres not many problems in life that throwing money actually can solve them, but this one actually can be. The question for the night was, why doesn't America just fund to get malaria wiped out here? 1 days worth of pay at the Pentagon could pay for the entire country to be malaria free. Pretty eye opening.
I've always been aware that malaria kills people but not really knew the intensity of it until I got here. If it doesn't get treated within the first 3 days most people will die. Malaria is not something that should be treated lightly. I just wish I had all the money in the world to help this poor country out. I hope I can help raise some awareness about this because I personally had no idea how big of a problem it is!