25-30
NUTRITION TRAINING THROUGH
COMMUNITY EXPERIENCE
The examples we have given show that food problems, their causes, and ways of
solving them differ from area to area, and even from village to village.
For this reason, nutrition courses designed at the national or international level
may do as much harm as good in individual villages. Instead of learning from
standardized plans, health workers need a flexible learning situation that
helps them to observe, analyze, and adapt.
More and more programs are making community practice the focus of nutrition
training. A 10-day nutrition course in Indonesia bases training on 8 small-group
‘field activities’ in neighboring villages. Three of the activities involve observation of
ongoing community programs, and 5 are practical working sessions with members
of a selected village.
These 5 are:
1. General evening meetings in the village to get acquainted, discuss aims, and
plan activities.
2. An evening session of nutrition training for a small group of villagers who will
become nutrition volunteers (kaders) in the selected village.
3. Shopping in the market, then cooking and serving a noon meal to selected
children.
4. Conducting a nutrition survey of all children under age 5, filling out weight
charts, and visiting homes of malnourished children.
5. Final evening meeting to discuss results of activities and discuss future
steps.*
Perhaps the most important part of this experience-based approach is that it
brings learning down to earth. Real problems in real villages often are very different
from the way they seem when studied in class. As the Indonesian program
instructors point out:
“Until nutrition workers have tried
to deal with the problem of the cranky
child who refuses to eat whatever
the mother prepares, they have not
come to grips with the most essential
element of applied nutrition.”
*From “Training Course for Village Nutrition Program,” J.E. Rohde. D. Ishmail. and others in Tropical
Pediatrics and Environmental Child Health, vol. 25. number 4. August, 1979