Hi guys! It’s been awhile. I’ve been back at post for a month now, and I’d like to update you all on what I’ve been doing during that time! During vacation, I received a suitcase full of toothbrushes and toothpaste, courtesy of a friend of my father’s from high school (A Medina Bee alumna!) Kim Reber Henderickson, and her connections with Mike Franks, with Crest. I traveled to Cameroon with these materials, and then split them in two for my village and Fanning and Casey’s village and we held a hygiene training at each health center! The focus of this training was for women and children, as we know the largest impact will be through teaching the mothers, who then go on to teach their children. We started each session with  information on the importance of dental hygiene and how to properly brush and floss teeth.

At the end of the presentation, the women came up one by one and received a “petit cadeau” of a toothbrush for themselves (and one for their child if they were of the proper age). At the beginning of the distribution we handed out numbers to ensure that women received a brush if they came and watched the whole talk, and not just at the end to get the free toothbrush and toothpaste.

Overall, the two distributions went well! We learned a lot from the first one in Fanning and Casey’s village, and were much better prepared and organized for the second one in my village. We reached nearly 100 families in my village through the mothers, and recorded their names and how many children that they have. In Fanning and Casey’s village, since there we more children than mothers, we reached about 50 families in total. All in all we distributed nearly 300 toothbrushes (in adult and child sizes) and toothpaste. The goal of this project was not to give everyone in our villages a toothbrush, but to give incentives and information to the matriarch of families so that they might, in the future, invest money in dental health for themselves and their children. Again, many thanks to Crest and Kim Reber Henderson for the generous contribution.

Finally, I’d like to say a little about the beekeeping project and grant. Casey and I just received the donor names of the people that allowed their information to be shared, and we’d like to just say a huge thank you! Thanks to you all, we were able to raise the money in only 3 short days, and should be receiving the money soon so that we can begin booking the training and buying materials in time for our set start date!  Many thanks for the generous donations from our family and friends. It means the world to us that you are supporting our work here, and we are very excited for this opportunity to make positive change. I will be updating this blog and our beekeeping blog (https://adamawabeekeepers.blogspot.com/) as the project progresses.