By Ben Rhodes*
With the support of the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), the local health board of The United Methodist Church in Sierra Leone has mobilized more than 2,300 local volunteers to distribute 390,000 insecticide-treated bed nets across the Bo District of Sierra Leone this month.
The distribution, funded through the church's Imagine No Malaria initiative, is part of a larger health campaign that also provides Vitamin A and deworming medication to children. Intestinal worms account for about half of nutritional issues in children, and volunteers seek to inform parents about this and other child health issues as they share malaria messages.
“We are educating mothers so that children know that they need to wash their hands before eating and after using the bathroom,” said Beatrice Gbanga, a Global Ministries missionary who works with the local health board.
When volunteers visit homes to provide medication and Vitamin A, they also count the number of sleeping areas in each dwelling and provide vouchers to the residents to obtain bed nets. Vouchers can be redeemed at 106 locations throughout Bo District.
The use of distribution locations, called static points, is a change in strategy since the church's last distribution in Bo District in 2010. Then, volunteers brought bed nets to each house directly. This method was cumbersome, said UMCOR officials, but necessary in part due to a lack of bed net awareness.
Today, through ongoing education efforts, bed nets are valued more highly, and people are more willing to travel a short distance to obtain them. “Everyone understands what ‘bed net’ means,” said Gbanga.
Volunteers also make a second visit to homes to ensure that the bed nets have been hung properly.
“The amazing success of Imagine No Malaria is that we now have a team in place in Sierra Leone equipped to do all of this on their own,” said Shannon Trilli, director of Global Health for UMCOR, during an evening debriefing with local health board leaders. Health board representatives from Malawi and Ivory Coast were also present to learn from the Sierra Leone team.
Trilli said that the health board has made additional improvements and achievements since the 2010 distribution.
“The capacity of the health board has grown significantly, and we can show impact better through our monitoring and evaluation efforts. Our relationships with communities and local partners are much stronger, too,” she said.
Bishop John Yambasu of the Sierra Leone Annual (regional) Conference spoke at a kick-off event on June 5. Held in a football stadium, the event celebrated that UMCOR and other partners will distribute a total of more than 3.5 million bed nets in Sierra Leone this month, in coordination with the Ministry of Health.
“I look forward to the day when I can say, ‘Once upon a time there was a disease in Sierra Leone called malaria, but now it is gone,’” Yambasu told the crowd.
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*Ben Rhodes is associate general secretary of Communications and Development of the General Board of Global Ministries. He traveled to Sierra Leone to cover the launch of the June 2014 bed net distribution.
