Peanut Butter Haiti Time!

The blog is back! Although, no longer a Peace Corps blog, I figured I would keep up to date on the latest gypsy adventure, Haiti. With any luck, this will be updated much more regularly and contain progress and highlights of my work and not the ramblings of a country girl suffering from constant heat rash and heat happies. With any luck, but no guarantees. First off, I should explain what I am doing in Haiti. One of my dear professors at Wash U is a leading expert in undernutrition and has done work in Haiti and Kenya for several years. She’s currently heading several research projects in Haiti around fortified peanut butter (Nutributter, PlumpyNut are some of the more recognized names of this type of food). This pb has been shown to be effective in combating child malnutrition among young children under 24 months. The project that I will be working on is an expansion of sorts to school age children to see if similar fortified pb can impact growth and diet diversity (aka improve nutritional status). So I am part of the Wash U branch of this project (research, data collection, analysis) which is just one branch of the project tree. Meds and Foods for Kids, a ngo based in St. Louis, acts as the organizers of the project (coordinating with other partners, managing project staff, distributes the pb). This is who I will mostly be working with, though I’ll also be working with the other partners from time to time. Edesia is a company that developed and designed the package design of the pb (aka branding the pb). The National Soybean Research Lab was responsible for early acceptability of the project. The Ministry of Education in implementing the school feeding programs which feeds into the the Ministry of Health’s role in implementing national scale nutrition initiatives. So, needless to say, there are a lot of players involved. Like I said before, my roles is primarily research and working in the implementation of the program (assisting in trainings, data collection, analysis and reporting). We are working with six different schools across Cap-Haitien… …allow me to take a slight tangent… I won’t be living or working in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti but a slightly smaller city in the north called Cap-Haitien. It’s located right on the coast and I’m told has lovely beaches for what it’s worth. Google earth actually has a number of great photos of the city should you be of the satellite stalking kind. …back on track. So we are working with six different elementary schools, three of which will act as the control group (not get the pb) and three will be the experimental (get the pb). Not all kids at the schools are enrolled in the program but we hope to maintain our 1200 participants (aka kids). Kids getting pb will get it every day for several months. Each kid is measured three times (before the project, midway and at the end). So that’s the project and the reason I’m in Haiti in a nutshell- more to come as I get in country and started with my work!