Category: Learning Centers

Most of the community served by Goducate literacy centers do not have access to state health services. Hypertension is common there because of the high salt diet. However, people there with hypertension are unaware of their condition and do not seek treatment until complications, such as a stroke, occurs.

Goducate has decided to take a preventive approach with our anti-hypertension program. Armed with a simple consumer-grade digital blood-pressure machine, our health educator visits villages where Goducate has a literacy center to check the blood pressure of the students’ parents and to explain to them what hypertension is, how it comes about, and how to look out for its complications, such as heart problems, stroke, and kidney failure.

Those found to have high readings even after repeated measurements are advised to help themselves by doing the following:

– Lose weight if they are obese
– Make dietary changes such as cutting down on oil and salt
– Reduce or to quit smoking
– Exercise more, for example, by doing more gardening
– Seek medical treatment (for those with the more severely high readings)

The health educator will return to the village every 6 months to monitor the parents’ blood pressure.

Since the start of our deworming session in April this year, our local health educator has visited 18 of our 24 literacy centers. She educates both the students and their parents about worm infestation and how to prevent it by paying attention to good hygiene.

Our health educator also measured the students’ heights and weights before giving them a dose of anthelmintic (deworming) medicine. These height and weight measurements will be used to give us an idea of the efficacy of the deworming program.

From the first round of measurements, about 20% of the students fall within the underweight growth curve, whilst 5% fall within the severely underweight curve. Feedback from the teachers, parents, and students from centers that have had the deworming sessions is that at least 70% of the students excreted parasites and are much more alert and energetic now.

Our health educator will be revisiting each center in 6 months’ time to re-measure heights and weights.

One of the most difficult things about doing work in far-flung and poor communities is getting enough workers to go out and stay the course. When Goducate was faced with a community of hundreds of thousands of people in Sabah with no access to state education, the thought of finding enough teachers to educate the children there was mind boggling. But we realised that the mothers who had had some education could be trained to teach the children literacy and numeracy. In the past 3 years we have opened 24 literacy centers staffed by nearly 60 teachers and assistant teachers. The teachers meet every every month and undergo periodic re-training and upgrading. Well over 1000 students have passed through those centers. Some have been able to find work outside, while some have stayed on as assistant teachers.

A literacy center that has been operating for the past 6 years in another part of Sabah, about 5 hours’ drive away from where we are operating, heard about how we trained mums to be teachers and invited us to share our system and our curriculum, to help them expand their work.

About 2 months ago, when I brought our team of our supervisor, two teachers, and our transport manager to help them, there were 10 trainees waiting for us. Some of them had been teachers in the Philippines. The rest, who were teenagers and mothers who had had some education, were very nervous because they thought that trainees had to be highly educated people. But when they learnt that two of our teachers were mums-turned-teachers, and one was a teenager who was a student-turned-teacher, they relaxed and were able to take part fully in the training, and to ask questions freely during the discussion time.

From the updates that we have received from that center, our system and our curriculum are being implemented by them smoothly.