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• Maternal Health in Egypt
  
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• Family Planning and Nutrition in Ecuador
  
• Midwifery Education
  
• Underlying Factors in Women's Health
  

Family Planning and Nutrition in Ecuador

This interview is with an American health student who worked in Ecuador with family planning and nutrition. She worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years, and conducted community workshops in small communities in Ecuador.

Family Planning in Ecuador

Many families in Ecuador recognize that family planning is an important method of improving the quality of life for the entire family. As a family has more children, it becomes an economic burden to feed their children nutritious meals or to send their children to school.

In Ecuador, the birth control pill and the intrauterine device (IUD) are popular forms of birth control. Condoms are not widely used. Natural family planning methods, which are also popular, require women to understand their menstrual cycle.

We really struggled with how to do the calendar method! People would have calendars in their homes, but only sometimes would they pay attention to them. We would have to identify, "This is not talking about the first day of December, but the first day of your period." It's complicated to explain it to anybody. Then put it in the context of a culture that might not pay attention to exactly what day it was.

Although there was a lot of interest in using family planning methods, there was also some resistance.

Listen for the types of resistance health professionals can come up against in small communities in Ecuador.

Communication Issues: Teaching Nutrition

Teaching nutrition also was difficult. Some nutrition information, such as the food pyramid or complete proteins, is fairly complex. It was important to teach these concepts using images that made sense to the women in Ecuador.

We didn't go in with the food guide pyramid, because it was a little too complex, a little too detached. We broke that down into what we called the nutrition house. Also, we talked about protein, and how it is important to get complete protein. In order to get a complete protein, what I designed was a necklace, which was based on an indigenous necklace which almost all of the women would wear. And I taught that they had to have all the different pearls for the necklace to be complete.

Community Workshops

Health professionals can use community workshops to gather community members together to learn about health issues such as family planning and nutrition. Community workshops can reach many members of the community at once. It may also encourage participants to ask more questions and hear the answers to questions that others ask.

It is important that the community and especially community leaders have input on the types of workshops conducted. Community leaders can encourage people to come to workshops, but they can also block attendance if they feel uncomfortable by the workshop topic. Working with community leaders from the beginning can help increase community interest and participation.

Community workshops worked well in the small communities of Ecuador.

Hear how health professionals informally assessed the effectiveness of their workshops.

Communities are a lot harder to define here, especially if you are talking about urban area. What is a community there? If you are working in a small village of 300, okay there is your community. People stuck together there a lot better, people didn't migrate out that much. Here, people are moving all the time. How would you define a community, a certain housing development or a school? I think it's a lot more difficult here.

Dawn Haney, January 2001
Last Modified: 02/03/2001                           
Contact: Dawn Haney haneydaw@arches.uga.edu