gepubliceerd op 2009-11-13 00:00:00.0
Together, the friends Astrid Takkenberg and Suzanne Zimny, both 5th year students of Nutrition and Health, stayed in Ecuador for four months. They investigated the intake of iron by children in a small Andes village. The contrasts of these children with the kids in the capital city, were extremely sad.
Suzanne: ‘Our research is part of Telfun, a major project set up in Wageningen, that is also active in India and Ghana. Four PhD students, of different disciplines, are selected for each country. As a team, they will investigate the possibilities of improving the quality of life of the poorest people in that particular country. In our case, we were supported by a Ecuadorian specialist of Nutrition.’
Astrid: ‘She had arranged a very nice apartment for us to stay, in the capital city Quito, close to the private university at which we conducted our research. Parts of Quito are rich and wealthy, much more than we had expected. This simplified our process of getting used to Quito a lot.
Suzanne: ‘We took a language course during the first two weeks of our stay in Ecuador. After that, we trained students from Ecuador, who would help us with our work in the field. To assess the amount of iron the kids take in every day, we used the ’24 hour recall’-method. This means that you ask the mothers what the children ate in the last 24 hours. To obtain the best results from these questionnaire, you have to follow a certain procedure, so that the mothers will be able to give you most of the answers. It was this procedure that we taught the students.
Astrid: ‘Before we started our investigations, we went to the village to check out which bowls and plates people used. Luckily enough, the entire village used very similar bowls and cutlery, so we could draw measuring lines in all their cups and bowls. By doing this, the mothers could easily answer questions about how much their child had eaten that day.
Suzanne: ‘We stayed in the village for two weeks, to take all the measurements. Besides asking questions, we also weighed the kids and took their heights. On the one hand it was wonderful to work with all the kids. On the other hand, it was very confronting as well… When the children took off their clothes, you could see how the girls wore nothing underneath their skirts, often not even underwear, while we wore hats and scarfs because it was so cold outside! The boys were often dressed a little better, but even they would for example wear shoes that were too small for their feet, so that their feet and toes were grown out of shape.’Astrid: The contrasts with the capital city were enormous. Especially because we were working on a private university, were the richest of the people roam. We sometimes found it difficult to cope with the differences we witnessed. However, the university did offer us good possibilities to conduct our research and by that, the situation in the village might be improved in the end.’
