AIDS for Food

I forgot two really important things yesterday:

The first forgetting to give my sister the credit for going to Carnivore - the restaurant that used to serve game - over the weekend.  Apparently they no longer serve game at all due to government regulations.  We were also encouraged to go there by some of the locals here, further adding to my suspicion that everybody is on a nationwide, Westerner-referral commission scheme.

The second is forgetting to include the pictures below, which are the whole reason we are here.  We took these photos during our site visit to the nutrition clinic in a Nairobi slum.  The boy is about nine months old (apparently he's small for nine months... I have no point of reference, so I didn't know until someone pointed it out).

His arm is being measured for both body fat and length, malnutrition metrics, which at this point put him right on the border of being malnourished.  He was born a healthy weight, but his mom weaned him after four months, succumbing to Kenyan conventional wisdom that breastmilk doesn't provide enough nutrition for growing toddlers, despite years of government and NGO campaigns to educate the population that babies should only be breastfed for the first six months of life.  Within a couple of months he was underweight and stunted, which is when he was first brought to the clinic.

He was only moderately malnourished, so the clinic provided him with monthly supplies of USAID-supplied UNIMIX  - a highly fortified flour / porridge mix used for interventions - and after 2-3 months, he was on his way back to normal development (though he may never grow to the same size he would have had his mom fed him correctly).

Severely malnourished children are given PlumpyNut, which you may have seen on 60 Minutes.

Our job is figuring out how to permanently get nutrient fortifications into his food everyday so he never has to go back to the clinic. 

Four learnings from today that further highlight the challenge we face:

1. The nutritionists at the clinic told us that his family shouldn't have any trouble feeding him correctly since the husband had what qualifies as a high-paying job in the slums - he works six days a week (he's one of the lucky ones who gets a day off) and makes 300 shillings per day, which is about $4.


2. A lot of times the UNIMIX and Plumpy Nut interventions don't work because the families end up sharing the fortified foods (which are precisely calibrated for different levels of child malnutrition) since they don't have anything to eat.


3. In meeting with the UN's World Food Program today, we were discussing the reasons why a food sprinkle fortification (a packet of nutrients that can be added to any meal) program didn't work in the Somali refugee camps in Kenya.  Apparently the packaging the UN designed looked like a condom, and the muslim Somalis wouldn't even touch them.


4. In some parts of Kenya there are food / nutrition programs for HIV / AIDS patients, but not ordinary people.  In some of the most desparate areas, people have started going out and contracting HIV on purpose in order to qualify for the food programs.