De-worming

For de-worming, we basically walk around the slums, find a shady spot, and hand out the chocolate squares to the kids who gather. Word usually spreads quickly and mothers with babies all come to find us to make sure they don’t miss out on the Combantrin.

The instruction on the packets say to hand out the de-worming tablets by age and weight. However, we often have to just guess how many squares to give out judging by the kids’ sizes. This is because some kids are so malnourished that they can look much smaller and younger than their actual age. Sometimes we have to ask the kids how old and they are, and often we were surprised by the answer. Some eight year old kids in the slum look like five year old Australian kids.

You can see during this de-worming stop in Aroma that we were trying to rip the packages as we went. But it was just too slow given the gathering crowd, and the heat was melting the chocolate. We knew then that we had to come up with a better plan that involved preparing the chocolate squares ahead of time.

As the medicine tastes like chocolate and the children think it is chocolate, some will keep coming back for more because they think it is a lolly. But it is not healthy for them to have an overdose. To stop this, we brought stamps from Sydney to mark the children’s hands when they have been given the Combantrin. This way, when we check each person’s hand, if they have a stamp we don’t give them more. We also brought stickers that we gave to the kids.