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Global Buzz Report: 2014 03 01

ICAI Board Report: March

During February’s ICAI Board meeting, we discussed and agreed to support the nominees for the ToP Policy working group.  We look forward to following the work of this group as they move forward and supporting them as needed.  We also spent good time further discussing the draft of our 2014 Business Plan.  We expect to complete our work on it at next month’s meeting and to share it with the network shortly thereafter.

ICAI Board President, Martin Gilbraith, has been working with Bill Staples to prepare for the special General Assembly on February 26th, 2014.   Going into the GA, the Board is recommending that the General Assembly vote to approve a resolution in order that ICAI may pass the new Canadian 'continuance' process to continue as a non-profit in Canada.  We will share the results of this special GA in the next edition of the Global Buzz.

As always, if you’d like to get in touch with the ICAI Board, please email me,

Staci Kentish
  Board Secretary, at secretary@ica-international.org


BANGLADESH:

Aziz returned from Canada on February 4th and will be here now for an extended period of time. He has joined the University and has a very busy schedule. This month he visited the Gabua village project and then the ICA Ghoramara Project twice. He has had several meetings with ICA members and staff, and has also had the opportunity to meet the ICA Chandpur team several times during a visit to his hometown.

Shah Alam, Manik, Elias and Aziz were very happy with the idea put forth by the Ghoramara Community about fundraising through charging a fee for use of the Learning Centre. The money raised will be used for the renovation and maintenance of the school building. The ICA Chandpur team decided to apply to have electricity connected to the school building.

The faculty team is concentrating on professional development, with the help of Aziz's active team building support. We are planning to offer ToP courses soon. This month we hired a part time intern to serve this purpose.

Staff          admin@ica-bangladesh.org


JAPAN:

Maki Tsukamoto returned to ICA Japan at the beginning of 2014, only to leave the next day for Mindoro in the typhoon disaster zone of the Philippines. The team of four from Japan joined Aldersgate College and local people to deliver Food Emergency Aid to 3500 indigenous people. See our Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/icajapan.org for fantastic photos of this one month aid event.

March 2nd Shizuyo Sato, Maki Tsukamoto, and Motoko Imagi flew once again to Mindoro, this time to deliver Sustainable Emergency Aid. Joining a similar local team of nearly 30 people, they will purchase and deliver 20 kinds of seeds to 1250 families, see them planted, and return once again later on to monitor the growth of plants which will provide an abundant year around food supply and new leadership as well.

The international team (Shankar Jadhav, Shizuyo Sato, and Naomi Sato) completed the end line survey of five years of integrated village development near Pune India. See our 50 page report with pie charts and lots of photos in about a week on our web site (www.icajapan.org) for this report and vision of what is needed next.

We received the good news that the second year of development will be funded by MOFA about March 15th. This aid was in response to a six month food in eastern Bihar, India. This second term project will again train 500 in preschool education, provide multi-purpose centers for all of the community organizations to meet and discuss, and train them in leadership and community development. We have already seen miraculous transformation as a result of ICA Japan and partner HCDI of India efforts.

Naomi Sato, now living in Okinawa, finished the second draft of a proposal to re-integrate formerly waring people into their communities. Over a 3 year period we propose that Cote de'Ivoire staff and ICA Japan work with 30 villages and the central city in a depressed area about 60 kilometers from Abidjan. The hoped for result is that hundreds of youth will learn new occupations and the area will begin recovering to a prosperous future.

We have begun a weekly staff blog on our web site so you will be welcome to follow these activities often as they develop, and see our work and local culture on Facebook regularly as well.

Gratefully for these great people doing such visionary works.

Wayne Ellsworth           wayne@icajapan.org


KENYA: (Sophie Donde)

I work with People Living with HIV, (PLHIV sex workers, grandmothers and children infected and affected by HIV and AIDS).  These are people diagnosed with HIV and AIDS and are under KICOSHEP. We work with 3451 PLHIV, training them on positive living, and adherence and compliance with medication.
The challenges we handle are those of women living with HIV who are overcome with fear of infecting their babies, the trauma of finding out their positive status while expecting, doubting their ability to exclusive breast feeding, as well as managing discordant relationships.

PLHIV are seeing a considerable change in health.  They reluctantly opt to go for ARVs which they are initially opposed to.  However we have seen PLHIV with a CD4 count as little as 39, later move to a CD4 count of 600 through our home based care programmes with caregivers and community health workers.

HIV is taking another trend, it is not just about HIV awareness, this is over, but handling trends that come with the disease.  PLHIV are contracting other life limiting illnesses such as HIV and cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, cardiovascular and many other diseases which cause a lot of pain that is more severe.  Pain can be physical, psychosocial, emotional or spiritual.  At Kiocshep this has been taken very seriously and we ensure that all clients live and die without pain.

The pain management is measured using the World Health Organization (WHO) pain scale which we have translated for our clients, to better understand and be able to explain what their pain level is.  The pain is treated based on its level with opioids, of which the lowest level we use are paracetamols and the highest is morphine. We have initiated a palliative care programme to give people relief from pain.  We hold community forums where we educate communities on the issues of palliative care, reproductive health and life skills.  Appropriate care values are implemented among families with life limiting pains, and communities are encouraged to support them. 

This is how we provide appropriate care for patients and families.  We ensure that these values are well practiced by the patients and their caregivers.

  • Agency- ability/power to assemble and direct one’s own care and treatment.
  • Dignity- Honor unique individuality and life world of the individual
  • Interdependency- Reciprocity of caring process (who is caring for who?)
  • Solidarity- Responsible for each other’s well being
  • Subsidiary- responsive and responsible resource allocation at the local level.
  • Sustainability- Stewardship of resources and short/ long term planning to ensure regeneration of care processes

After the clients have improved and are strong enough to continue with treatment, they are linked to support follow up, home based care review, and ongoing counselling.  They are then linked to a support group that introduces livelihood programmes such as income generating activities, group savings and loan concepts so they can use their money to start a small scale business. This helps them support their medication and basic needs, which in turn reduces dependency syndromes. When their business is fully established they are further trained using mentorship sessions and investments programmes. 

This is a programme that can be replicated anywhere with different target groups

Sophie Donde          sophiedonde@yahoo.com

Programme Manager

KICOSHEP KENYA


NEPAL:

ICA Nepal has introduced: Research Training Calendar, 2014, with an objective to promote quality research in academic and development sectors. ICA Nepal is currently conducting a series of research based training sessions and workshops. In February, classes on SPSS, English for Researchers, ICT, and STATA were conducted successfully. The sessions were facilitated by highly trained experts experienced in their particular field, and attended by PhD scholars, individual researchers and students. At present our ICA Team is working to introduce a participatory approach to learning and facilitation in research philosophy and methodology.

In its effort to help community development, ICA Nepal has successfully completed a number of adult literacy classes, the construction of a toilet and improved cook stove facilities in our far western region. We adopted a participatory approach for these programs; hence we were directly involved with community people and local clubs.

Ishu Subba        ishu@ica-nepal.org