While the international instructors were on their way home after a successful but frankly exhausting week of instructor development and training, Grace was busy preparing to teach 24 healthcare professionals on their next NCC. This course will take the number of nurses, doctors and midwives trained in newborn care in Cameroon to nearly 400. 2 extra people turned up from the local government facility, having heard on the grapevine that the course was going on.
All the instructors also teach resuscitation skills to staff in their own healthcare facilities. As Grace says “before, when there was a sick baby born, people were running in all directions [to get away from it]. Now people run towards the delivery area to try and resuscitate the baby.” As Jarlath says (Irish retired paediatrician and senior instructor with NICHE), “give people the confidence to give something a go, and the competence will naturally follow” because people have a driving need to do things better.
Maslow opined that humans would want to develop themselves and move on up his pyramid if the lower levels of needs were satisfied. That certainly seems to be the case in Cameroon.
The somewhat incongruous paper strawberries hanging from the ceiling in a lot of the pictures from the last fortnight are left over from the teaching facility having been used for a party last month! We had a similar situation in Liberia in 2019 when we taught under a ceiling full of withered brown and yellow balloons and didn’t really notice until the photos came out. They don’t seem to detract from the learning.