Creating a food chain
AT THE midway point of the Rotary-backed Alleviation of Malnutrition project in Papua New Guinea, volunteer project leader Russell Stephenson is seeing valuable changes in the communities he is working in.
The 75-year-old retired horticulturist and Rotary Club of Nambour member originally devised an awareness program as a result of seeing first-hand over several visits to the country the dire situation of malnutrition throughout PNG.
Working under the umbrella of Rotary’s Food Plant Solutions project that promotes cultivating traditional plants, Dr Stephenson is now trying to get the message out to remote communities in the Western Provinces that the people, particularly babies, need a range of nutrients to develop and grow properly.
“Almost 45 per cent of the young children are stunted and about 15 per cent wasted,” he said.
“It’s caused by inadequate diet; it’s very simple.”
The solution, he says, is for the community to have a better diet.
He has taken the theory behind Food Plant Solutions, consulted extensively with colleagues in PNG and then adapted it to work in the field.
For the past 18 months, Dr Stephenson has flown into isolated communities of the North Fly District, where some of the poorest people in the world live on an average income of $10 a year.
He based himself out of the Evangelical Church’s Mougulu Mission, but often happily stayed in the surrounding villages.
“It’s not a dangerous place — which can’t be said for a lot of the rest of PNG,” he said.
“There are no government services there, no shops, no police, nothing,” he added.
But there are about 35,000 people he is trying to reach.
With the help of interpreters, Dr Stephenson initially ran a two-week train the trainer program covering nutrition, health and hygiene, family planning and breastfeeding.
The focus was on babies and young children growing strong, healthy and smart.
“We called for volunteers and I expected we would get about 25 or 30 and mostly women,” he said.
“I got 60 and the majority were young men.
“We spent a week going over the theory that I wanted them to teach in their villages and then another week practising preparing and teaching a lesson. I also prepared a manual for them to work from.”
Dr Stephenson got them to focus on the use of local foods, since imported food isn’t sustainable and far too expensive.
After that course, 15 teams of instructors went out to their villages where they taught 41 courses to 8600 villagers, which represented more than 2000 families or nearly half the families in the district.
“I was pretty pleased with that,” he said.
Since then Dr Stephenson has delivered nutrition workshops directly to various villages and set up demonstration food gardens and planted new crops.
“The main nutritional problem there is lack of energy as their main food, cooking banana, is a very weak energy food. They are pretty tasteless to my palate, but they love it,” he said.
“They also eat lots and lots of green leaves from the bush which are particularly nutritious.
“But there is no protein in their diet.
“There is no meat in the diet even though there are pigs running around everywhere. The problem is those pigs signify wealth and celebration.”
He is teaching communities about eating high-energy corn and coconuts plus nuts.
The three-year project has month-long visits each quarter and Dr Stephenson will head back this month to deliver elementary training in setting up a small village business. It’s not something he has much knowledge in, but Rotary is committed to include this in aid work.