Nutrition Site Number 3 has finally opened

Sunday Aug 5 was a special day for our nutrition team here.

To give you a bit of background. I have come to work as the Nutrition Project Manager for Medair. Medair is one of many NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) that is responding to the Rohingya refugee crisis which has brought an estimated 1.2 million people to Bangladesh. Most of them have settled in a huge area that is divided into 20+ camps called Kutapalong. A coordinating body has given different NGOs responsibilities in the camp according to what services they can provide. We have been asked to set up and run 3 different nutrition sites in Camp 6, Camp 16 and Camp 3. One of the biggest challenges was finding a little bit of land on which to construct the largely bamboo structure for each of the sites in a place with very high population density. The first two are already

running and Camp 3 was our last one to open.  

This is what happened a week ago on Sunday (incidentally the work week here runs Sunday - Thursday given that this is a predominately Muslim country-Friday is therefore the official weekend day). To get to the point of opening the site, beyond finding the space, the land had to be prepared with sandbags to prevent erosion and the structure needed to built. Next our registration team needed to register each of the households in our catchment area (the area we serve) that had children under 5 and PLWs (pregnant and lactating women) - amongst a general population of 40,000. The children under 5 and PLWs account for 6,000 persons. A couple of days before the site opened we had the food delivered to our onsite storeroom as well as all the supplies - tables, chairs, boxes of registration cards, scales, everything needed to run a nutrition site. Sunday morning our team arrived to meet our local Bangladeshi staff, our local Rohingya volunteers, and our community nutrition volunteers (also Rohingya). Introductions were made, we spent about an hour setting up the banners, the

stations and making sure everything was in place. Then around 10:30 the first beneficiaries arrived - those who had been asked to come the first day were a group of around 50 to allow our staff the chance to settle in and make sure everything was running smoothly.

Now 10 days later this 3rd nutrition site is well on its way to serving around 350-400 women and

children a day, providing all of them a monthly ration of enriched food. Phil and I actually just arrived in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, this evening. We are headed back to the US tomorrow for the wedding of our son Nathan to our soon to be daughter-in-law Anna Jeide. We look forward to seeing family and friends as we celebrate this special day. We'll be in Minneapolis from Aug 17 - 26. Feel free to give us a call or drop in for a visit if you're in the area while we're back.