By Macarena Arias | Project Leader
After our wonderful 3-day workshop on Women's Health, co-sponsored by Shilpa Darivemula, founder of The Aseemkala Initiative, (you can read more about our workshop here!) the attending women were so inspired and motivated that they decided to run their own community-based health campaign!
During the workshop, as we talked extensively about cervical cancer, a very common disease amongst Shipibo women, one of the women stood up and asked, "When are we getting our PAP-smears done?" and this was the birth of how we started supporting women in organizing their own health campaign.
As we researched how to make this happen, we learned that the local health post will deliver a free PAP smear campaign only if the women gathered a list of 100 participants. And so we organized meetings, and sooner than expected, the local women were already walking around their settlements to gather the needed names.
Gathering the names became harder than expected. The stigma against PAP smears, added to bad experiences due to poor medical services made some women reluctant. However, slowly but surely, our lists started to fill up. We were happy to see how there was considerable interest in women to monitor their own health. We could also see the concern many mothers had for their daughters, who usually start having sex at a very earñly age. Women's past bad experiences made us really pay attention to how this campaign would be executed. We want to make sure that this campaign really offers the best services possible as all women deserve the best health care they can get.
The health campaign will happen anytime this month (March), as soon as the women finish gathering 100 names. For now, we will keep supporting them with transport costs, and meals. We also hope to conduct a complete health assesment of the community in order to better target their needs, and of course, continue the conversation with our core community team.
We are so proud of our women in the core team, Luzmila, Silveria, and Amelia for walking from home to home, gathering data and names in order to make this happen!
We hope to continue to support them in their work, and to help them access the best healthcare possible.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
