School Feeding

In my profession we tend to focus on the "critical window" of nutrition for kiddos 0-2 years. This is when the effects of malnutrition are more reversible, where the biggest bang for your humanitarian health aid is found. But...what about kids that are older than that? They still are hungry too. This week I had the opportunity to attend a roundtable discussion on school feeding, mostly focused on Africa. The Honorable George McGovern, former Senator of SD and instigator of funding for school feeding domestically and abroad, was the opening speaker. At 85, he's still a very coherent statesman. It was an awe inspiring moment to hear him speak to us, a small group of 40 school feeding implementors, donors, and policy makers. He said "dollar for dollar, the best return we get on foreign aid is the education of girls." And what gets girls to school? School feeding, either in the traditional form of a cooked meal, or more likely in the form of a take home food ration for the whole family to benefit from. Perhaps a food ration offsets the home labor lost when a daughter attends school. Educated girls tend to get married later, have fewer children, are stronger socially, and potentially have a better prenatal nutritional status giving the next generation of babies a head start (birthweight wise)in life. For me it was a good reminder that food is much more than nutrition, and that hunger is worth feeding no matter the age of the person.

Thoughts that make you go Hmmm....

When food prices soar 48%, we just spend 48% more on our groceries, but they eat 48% less than before.

Not quite the same as a blockade, but just as exciting...

Where I work on Mass and 3rd NE has it's share of sirens going by. So I thought nothing of it until I heard a second screaming vehicle go by in quick succession. When I looked out my window, I saw that the firetruck was laying hose on the road. Hmmm... And then we saw lots of people walking around our corner and down the sidewalk. Looked like an evacuation! So we ran down the hallway to the front side window, and Kevin our IT guy said he saw smoke coming out of the tall building next door. So of course we had to go outside and gawk. The fire crew had hoisted 3 ladders over to the 5 story building under renovation and were chopping with axes into a vertical conduit that was leaking smoke and discoloring the top floor exterior wall. Some bursts of material came out - my theory is it was some kind of flame retardant foam bits that were flying out - and that was about all there was for excitement. But good to know the DC fire department is on top of things - they had sent out at least 6 trucks to handle the emergency.

Local Determinants of Malnutrition - the Paper

OK, so this week I ended up being a bit of a workaholic. I put in at least 9 extra hours. That's a whole extra day. (I'm hoping for comp time.) All in order to get a final paper ready to present at a conference that we co-hosted - "Food Security Capacity Building and Beyond: Excellence in Nutrition and Agriculture." (Cover at right with some freaking colors - really my colleagues are NOT a part of the BLUE MEN GROUP!) My role was to simply add the results from our Ethiopian workshop experience and tweek the Bolivian workshop results to reflect the newest data we collected. But it ended up being a lot more extensive than I originally anticipated (hence the hours spent burning the midnight oil...) But the paper turned out well, all 95 pages of it, and I got to present it at the conference yesterday. I finally had time to prep my slides on Wednesday afternoon, got a call from Tom our Health Director that night with some really important changes that needed to be made, requiring me to get to the office early on Thursday morning to adjust the presentation slides before I hustled over to the conference site. By the way, did I tell you it was a humid day. When I left my house I looked normal, but by the time I arrived at the conference, my hair was ridiculously curly and my face was dripping! And then the first guy who was supposed to be presenting hadn't shown up yet, so they asked if I wouldn't mind going first. (Fortunately he did show up at the last minute, so I could stop sweating and start breathing again!). I'm not the best public speaker, because I seriously dislike it, but once I got past the theoretically stuff and could talk from my own experience I starting getting into a rhythm - my "song and dance routine" as I call it. And by the Q&A time I was flying - they threw at least 12 questions at me and I was shooting back great answers left and right. And my boss Dave agreed - my best part was the Q&A time. People yesterday and even today said they really enjoyed my presentation. Wow! (The coolest part for me was getting invited to be 2nd author on the final paper. Since I never pursued publishing my MS thesis, this was the next best thing!)