This year I was blessed with a grant provided by the UC Davis Blum Centre to go to India. From August to September I worked alongside my school club/ngo and various other non profits. For an entire year I have been working on this Diabetes workshop. I felt prepared, but I didn’t account for potential changes to our plan once we were in India.
This is our second year working on diabetes in the village, the first year was gathering research and this year was to implement some field work. A private village doctor, let’s call him Dr. X was our main contact in the area. According to him, he estimated that 30% of the village of approximately 20,000 people are type 2 diabetic/borderline. During our discussion, he said the problem in this area is that people use ayurvedic medicine to replace insulin or simply do not go to the doctor and only listen when they’re finally diabetic but not enough people focus on prevention. To summarize, lack of diabetes education. Our workshop was to raise awareness of diabetes, many aren't even aware of what it is or what to do when diagnosed with it.
Guest House living room where we had our discussion and veggie guessing games.
The original plan was the first two hours or so he would present, and then the other two hours we would have a discussion of healthy foods vs unhealthy foods along with some educational games to recap our knowledge of the day.
I texted Dr. X upon arrival in India on his availability for our workshop, I received no response. I emailed him, no response. I called him, no response. This lasted for three days.
Revealing the vegetable/discussing its qualities with the self help group women
We finally went to his practice and spoke to him two days before our event, there he told us the date we had for an entire year, the date I have been emailing, texting, and calling him would no longer work. He had a two hour availability on Monday afternoon. In a matter of seconds our five hour workshop turned into a two hour meeting.
This was stressful but doable. We cut the workshop to one hour and focused on dialogue and education prevention. The two hour meeting was a success. Dr. X gave the diabetes presentation in the local language (Tamil) and used his own material to convey the importance of diabetes prevention. One area of improvement on my part, was to advise ahead of time of not eating tea and biscuits as a snack for the workshop. Both items are rich in sugar. I didn’t take into account that maybe not everyone knows foods that increase your sugar intake. We served biscuits and tea, but we persevered.
Woman blindfolded. Guessing the vegetable (ginger)
The event was still a success, we had our discussion of healthy foods and I noted common recipes that are high in vegetables/can be modified to reduce the amount of carbs. We played a veggie guessing game where people had to guess the vegetable in their hands blindfolded and we talked about if it was healthy and popular recipes it was in. I received positive feedback and now I want to develop possibly a curriculum for our partner ngo READ to implement for future workshops.
This is our second year working on diabetes in the village, the first year was gathering research and this year was to implement some field work. A private village doctor, let’s call him Dr. X was our main contact in the area. According to him, he estimated that 30% of the village of approximately 20,000 people are type 2 diabetic/borderline. During our discussion, he said the problem in this area is that people use ayurvedic medicine to replace insulin or simply do not go to the doctor and only listen when they’re finally diabetic but not enough people focus on prevention. To summarize, lack of diabetes education. Our workshop was to raise awareness of diabetes, many aren't even aware of what it is or what to do when diagnosed with it.
Guest House living room where we had our discussion and veggie guessing games.
The original plan was the first two hours or so he would present, and then the other two hours we would have a discussion of healthy foods vs unhealthy foods along with some educational games to recap our knowledge of the day.
I texted Dr. X upon arrival in India on his availability for our workshop, I received no response. I emailed him, no response. I called him, no response. This lasted for three days.
Revealing the vegetable/discussing its qualities with the self help group women
We finally went to his practice and spoke to him two days before our event, there he told us the date we had for an entire year, the date I have been emailing, texting, and calling him would no longer work. He had a two hour availability on Monday afternoon. In a matter of seconds our five hour workshop turned into a two hour meeting.
This was stressful but doable. We cut the workshop to one hour and focused on dialogue and education prevention. The two hour meeting was a success. Dr. X gave the diabetes presentation in the local language (Tamil) and used his own material to convey the importance of diabetes prevention. One area of improvement on my part, was to advise ahead of time of not eating tea and biscuits as a snack for the workshop. Both items are rich in sugar. I didn’t take into account that maybe not everyone knows foods that increase your sugar intake. We served biscuits and tea, but we persevered.
Woman blindfolded. Guessing the vegetable (ginger)
The event was still a success, we had our discussion of healthy foods and I noted common recipes that are high in vegetables/can be modified to reduce the amount of carbs. We played a veggie guessing game where people had to guess the vegetable in their hands blindfolded and we talked about if it was healthy and popular recipes it was in. I received positive feedback and now I want to develop possibly a curriculum for our partner ngo READ to implement for future workshops.
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