Mother & Child Survival
Comprehensive Community-Based Primary Health Care

Dalva Maria plays the accordion for participants in a recent Comprehensive Community-Based Health Workers Training in Porto Velho, Brazil. Photo: Caroline Njuki/UMCOR

Dalva Maria de Oliveira Ribeiro lives in the community of Eldorado, just outside Porto Velho, a city in the Amazon rainforest of northwestern Brazil. Dalva Maria is blind and one of her gifts is playing the accordion.

Eldorado has been settled by people who migrated from southern Brazil seeking, but not finding, better economic conditions. Because of the poverty of the migrants in Eldorado, many children are malnourished and there is a high rate of infant mortality. Members of the community have been uprooted from their culture and family support systems.

Dalva Maria decided to offer her musical gift to the community and began playing for the children. They would gather at a local home to sing with her and enjoy the accordion music. Before long she had 150 children coming daily.

Dalva Maria decided she had to do more for the children than play and sing with them. She began to teach them to read and write and raised money to feed them. The community recognized the need for a center for the children and a gathering place for the neighborhood women. Together they built a Methodist Church with a community room for children’s and women’s programs. The singing sessions grew into a day care and a community center for women and children of all ages. In Brazil, children attend school for only three or four hours a day. The rest of their learning is done through assignments and schoolwork to be done at home. The center provides children with meals and help with their homework. The children participate in team sports where they learn leadership skills and teamwork. They also paint, do other arts and crafts, have access to a library, and learn about God and God’s role in their lives. Local women and mothers were trained to work with the children. They also learned a variety of handicraft skills to generate income for themselves and their families.

Dalva Maria and the others who work with the children are concerned with the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being of the children. They have gained valuable tools for addressing the children’s health needs through Comprehensive Community-Based Primary Health Care (CCPHC) training–a rapidly growing ministry of the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

Community workers participate in a recent Comprehensive Community-Based Primary Health Care training in Porto Velho, Brazil. Photo: Caroline Njuki/UMCOR

People from all over Latin America attended the most recent CCPHC training session, held in Dalva Maria’s community of Porto Velho. Through Comprehensive Community-Based Health Care training, local community workers learn that health care is not just about treating disease, health means wellness, staying well, leading a healthy lifestyle. Participants at the Porto Velho training included nurses, community development practitioners, church leaders, pastors, activists, teachers, doctors and dentists. Training sessions are held periodically in different locations in Latin America and they include discussions of health for the elderly, children, infants, adolescents, pregnant women and nursing mothers.

Most people in rural and poor urban communities have little access to hospitals, clinics, and doctors. So they learn about how they can promote health through alternative methods. People learn that except in cases of serious illness or accident they have the resources within their own communities to prevent and treat illness and maintain a good standard of health. Community health workers learn about nutrition, herbal medicine, treatments for common illnesses like diarrhea and malaria, mental health and well-being, women’s health problems, prenatal and postnatal care, care of chronic diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy, family planning, dental care and the importance of a balanced lifestyle and lifelong education. They also address larger quality of living issues that affect the overall health of a community–safe drinking water, improvement of land and the production of nutritious food, animal care, and income-generation for women and other vulnerable groups. The underlying assumption of CCPHC is that most communities, no matter how poor they are, have sufficient knowledge, human and material resources to live a healthy life.

Participants take the skills and knowledge they gain from training sessions back to their communities and local projects. At the center in Porto Velho, Dalva Maria and the other workers are able to address the nutritional needs of the children, monitor their growth, and educate the children in good hygiene, dental care, and other practices that will help them lead healthy lives.

Other participants in the training session have taken the skills and knowledge they gained back to their own projects and ministries. For example, many pastors in Latin America run children’s programs with up to 400 children at a time. With CCPHC training, they are able to provide the skills and mentoring to keep children mentally and physically healthy. In Rio de Janeiro, participants take their newly gained skills and knowledge back to three centers where they work with destitute and homeless children from infancy to age 21. In addition to recreation and schooling, the centers provide a home for a number of homeless children, nutritious meals, comprehensive health screening, and dental care.

The Comprehensive Community-Based Health Care movement is growing every year, not only in Latin America, but in Africa, Asia, and Europe. In Latin America, UMCOR supports projects in Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador.

Your gifts to UMCOR’s Mother/Child Survival, Advance #701235-8 support training sessions for community health workers who share their skills and knowledge with their local communities throughout Latin America, promoting health and improving the overall standard of living and self-reliance of poor people in rural and urban areas.

Street children at a center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Diana Barnett. Used by permission.

UMCOR encourages you to give through your local United Methodist Church. Gifts may also be sent to: UMCOR, 475 Riverside Dr., Room 330, New York, NY 10115. To make a credit card donation, call (800) 554-8583.

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