Pills, pills, pills...

I have never seen so many pills in my life before as I saw last week. I changed my lovely hometown Ambovombe for Tana to set up a deworming project for the WFP schools in the South. Goal: assuring that each kid in every school gets a mebendazole pill to get rid of the worms in its body (a floated belly is often confused with having a nutritional deficiency but can also be the simple symptom of having a belly full of worms) and FAF pills to make up for their iron deficiency. My mission for this week: Making a 1000 packages, containing one deworming pill and 12 FAF (fer acide folide) pills for each student and drawing up a plan to distribute the packages amongst the 1000 schools in the South. Means to achieve all of this: A truckload full of boxes containing thousands and thousands of pills, stickers to write the name of each school on, 1000 plastic bags to pack them and not much time: before the end of the week everything had to be packed and sent off to the sub offices. Tic tac tic tac…

Even though Guido (my GEP-buddy who found some time to help me out) and me started off very enthousiasticly, we soon realized that we could never finish the work in time. Counting the pills, writing the name and district of each school on a sticker and packing the little bags in carton boxes took us just a little more time than expected. After one day we only packed 130 bags. And still had some 800 to go…

Luckily we got some “extras” to help us out the next day. These three girls, from a local employment agency, turned out to be very efficient workers and we managed to turn the meeting room in no time into a little pill factory: One person counting the mebendazole, another one counting the FAF, the third girl putting everything in the little plastic bags and Guido and me packing all the bags into big boxes to send everything off to the sub offices. Add some other ingredients like a constant non-stop supply of cookies and sweets, drinks (lemonade off course) and a radio and the ambiance got better and better. Colleagues came over to see what was going on in the meeting room and were surprised to see us, white hands from the mebendazole, surrounded by tons of pills, plastic bags and boxes, working like madmen on the driving rhythms of Malagassi songs. And where happy their help was not needed in order to achieve our arduous task.

We finished the work sooner then expected and managed to send all the medicines off to the sub offices of Tulear and Ambovombe. I will fly back to Ambovombe tomorrow to pick up the medicines and will continue by car to distribute the packages to the 11 CISCOs: In each school district we will have a meeting with the chef CISCO and the chefs ZAP (zone administrative pedagogique) to explain them what we expect from them in terms of distributing and usage of the pills. The chefs ZAP will distribute the pills by motorbike to the directeurs d’ecoles, who will finally give them to the students.  It is going to be a long and tough mission, since many CISCOs are very secluded and the roads are in a very bad condition, but it is the only way to assure that the medicines will get to the students on time. Too bad there is no such thing as TNT bush Express ;-)

I will keep you updated on my mission, from the 9th untill the 21th of November, which no doubt is going to be an experience since I will traverse the whole Southern part of Madagascar by car in only 12 days. (For the geography nerds amongst us: Fort Dauphin, Amboasary, Ambovombe, Tshiombe, Beloha, Ampanihy, Bekily, Betroka, Sakaraha, Betioky andTulear). It will be a great opportunity for me as well in terms of networking: I will visit all WFP sub offices, get to know all my colleagues and meet with the local authorities. I will keep you updated!