A New Year with the Community Development Facilitators

I was able to spend a couple weeks at home over the holidays, a nice time to relax and see some family and friends.  When I returned from my home leave we jumped right into our community development facilitator/community health evangelism training.  We hired eight new CDFs right before the Christmas break, adding to the 19 returning CDFs and coordinators.  We decided it was a good time to do a refresher for all the old staff while training the new staff.  This was the first time since I started last year that all of the CDFs were together in one place; it was a good week of training on the CDF role, leadership, Bible storying, and health lessons. 

CHE training includes both health and spiritual lessons; it is meant to be wholistic.  We stressed the importance of integrating the health and spiritual lessons.  So if you are teaching about sanitation or clean water, use Bible stories that are related.  The experienced CDFs mostly understand that concept and had some good examples of Bible stories they would use for various health topics.  We will continue to talk monthly about Bible lessons that can be integrated with the health lessons so that the CDFs can learn from each other.

The importance of wholistic care was illustrated during some of the health training sessions.  The new materials are all focused on pregnancy and newborn care.  The first lessons review reproductive health anatomy, fertility and conception.  For most of the CDFs, this information is pretty new.  There were times I wondered if the information was necessary in order to reach our goal of improving maternal and newborn health.  But through some of our discussion, I realized it is, and it needs to be combined with Biblical lessons on healthy relationships and marriages because there is a lot of room for growth in that area here.

During our lesson on the fertility cycle, one of the CDFs described a situation in which they were doing conflict resolution with a couple in the community.  The wife told the husband that she couldn’t have sex during her menstruation because it wasn’t safe, and the husband was upset.  The CDF wanted to know if that was true, if it would cause damage for a woman to have sex at this time.  We discussed that it is important to consider both the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the situation. Why did the woman feel she had to say that to her husband?  Would he respect her if she just said no, she didn’t want to?  What does it mean to love and respect one another?

In a culture where women are not as valued, where gender based violence is common, where maternal mortality remains so high, understanding both the physical and spiritual truths is so important.  Even though it may not be an easy subject to teach the CDFs and CHE, these are subjects that we must speak candidly about out if we really want to see change in individuals, families, and communities. I can facilitate a discussion on this topic, but as a single person I can’t speak from much experience on the healthy marriage side, so I am thankful for some of the mature CDFs and for God’s wisdom as we discuss.   Please pray for the CDFs as they are returning to their communities and getting ready to start the new classes.