WELLNESS WEDNESDAYS: Love Your Heart

“Blood pressure tends to rise with age.  About 65 percent of Americans age 60 or older have high blood pressure.  However, the risk for prehypertension and high blood pressure is increasing for children and teens, possibly due to the rise in the number of overweight children and teens.”  

                                                                   ---National Institutes of Health

February is American Heart Month.  Did you know that kids age 3 and older should be screened for high blood pressure?  Did you know that being obese is one of the risk factors for high blood pressure?  Have you talked with your children’s pediatrician yet? 

According to the National Institutes of Health, prevention and treatment of high blood pressure involves the following:

• Healthy eating
• Being physically active
• Maintaining a healthy weight
• Limiting alcohol intake
• Managing and coping with stress

Buried in the “healthy eating” message is the advice to limit sodium intake to no more than 2,300 mg a day or lower for individuals age 14 and older.   Nine out of ten kids consume too much sodium, most of it from processed foods.  

Consider the fact that 1/4 teaspoon of salt contains 590 mg of sodium.   Sodium is the elephant in the room. The fact is that the more salt you eat, the high your blood pressure will be.  Salt is everywhere, hidden in processed foods.  Restaurant foods are loaded with it. We talk about reading food labels and estimating portion sizes but the fact is most parents have no idea how much sodium their children actually consume. 

Next time you see a recommendation for “healthy eating,”think about salt.  Increase your awareness of the foods that are salt mines.  Some foods that are hidden sources of large amounts include hot dogs, prepared macaroni and cheese, ketchup, and canned soups.  Many of these contain more than a day’s recommended amount in one or two servings.  Eating dangerously high levels every day, combined with being overweight or obese, is a recipe for high blood pressure. 

Protect your children’s health and their hearts.  Learn about high blood pressure.  Read food labels to become aware of all the foods your children are eating that contain obscene amounts of sodium.  

Make sure your children are being screened by their pediatrician.  To learn more about high blood pressure from National Institutes of Health, click here. 

In gratitude,

Nancy Heinrich

Founder, Growing Healthy Kids, Inc. 

Increasing access to food during the drought season

Hello Friends,

The continuous dry spells the country is experiencing has led to an emergency predicament on household food security. In recent meetings, non-governmental organisations have been coming together to find solutions to mitigate the effects of the drought exacerbated by the El Nino phenomenon. In light of this, Nhaka Foundation has to answer a lot of questions internally as we work towards identifying immediate solutions to the hunger faced by children and caregivers alike. The most recurring question in our team conversations has been; how do we as an organisation continue to provide access to education, food and health services for the children in light of the funding challenges faced by many organisations in the country?

According to the Lean Season Monitoring Report released in January 2016, the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee (ZimVAC) assess that the effects of the drought are far reaching and are extremely visible in the rural areas. Grain prices have gone up by 35% nationally meaning people will have to pay more for very little.  Livestock prices have plummeted as farmers seek ways to get income in order to buy basic necessities for their families. Previously, cattle could be sold for at least US$380 on the market, now sales have gone down to as little as US$80, a necessary give away as farmers feel they would rather sell their cattle for very little instead of watching them starve to death (ZimVAC, January 2016, pp. 50-51). 

Social behavioural change is also a result stemming from the current situation. An article published by Her Zimbabwe in September 2015 refers to the increase in child marriages being attributed to by poverty as opposed cultural reasons and makes mention of surveys conducted by UNFPA. This is further corroborated by the surveys carried out in the ZimVAC report (ZimVAC, January 2016, p. 42) which attests to an increase in child marriages as parents are marrying off their daughters as a way to firstly ensure that their child will be taken care of and secondly earn some income in order to support the remaining family. As misguided as this is, the bride price creates a source of income for the families. The same report also states; issues of gender based violence, physical or sexual are more frequent with an increasing number of reported cases of domestic violence. Suicide rates have also increased.

One of the interventions Nhaka Foundation undertakes is a primary schools feeding program. The program ensures that each child in the schools that we support goes into the classroom and has the opportunity to maximise their potential and participates in classroom activities. Teachers at the different schools we support attest to the fact that absenteeism is decreasing, participation is improving and evident health conditions that spread quickly such as skin infections have improved. In order to increase a child’s potential to succeed through ECD enrolment we address issues of child protection and other pertinent social issues through continuous engagement with parents, community leaders and other stakeholders. However, these parenting programs need to be worth their while as parents are under increased pressure to find food for their families. This is a challenge Nhaka Foundation is seeking creative solutions to address. 

With the continued assistance of our donors, friends and supporters, we will continue offering support programs that continue to push our vision to create a nation with young children living a life full of possibilities even amidst the current challenges facing our nation.

Until next time,

Charity

WELLNESS WEDNESDAYS: Teaching Parents

“Like many young doctors, I had received virtually no instruction in nutrition.  Then, as now, medical schools focused almost exclusively on drugs and surgery, even though lifestyle causes most cases of heart disease and other chronic disabling condition.  In retrospect, my lack of formal knowledge of nutrition was a blessing in disguise.”      --David Ludwig, MD, PhD, from Always Hungry?

If doctors receive no training about nutrition in medical school, 

then is it any wonder that parents receive no training?  Since parents are responsible for foods purchased for their children, how do they learn about the good foods that children need for strong bodies and healthy minds?  If advertisers have their way, the only thing parents need to buy are the foods placed intentionally at eye level in grocery stores.  With every advertising dollar spent, they are telling parents, “Don’t worry about those highly processed foods, all those food dyes, and all the added sugars, fats, and salts.  Just buy what we tell you to buy.” 

We did that and now we have a childhood obesity epidemic on our hands.  According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 17% (or 12.7 million) of children and adolescents aged 2-19 years are obese. 

Babies are being born to obese mothers.  According to Dr. Ludwig, “excessive weight in one generation may predispose the next for higher lifetime risk of obesity, apart from genetic inheritance and the tendency of offspring to pick up their parents’ lifestyle habits.”*  We have a responsibility to America’s next generation to teach teenagers and young adults about the importance of getting to, and staying at, a healthy weight before they become pregnant. 

Here are 3 tips for parents (and parents-to-be):

1.  Read food labels:

• Count the number of ingredients.  If there are more than 5 or 8 ingredients, choose something else. 
• If you can’t pronounce the ingredients, they are not good for you.  
• If food dyes are listed in the ingredients, don’t buy it. 
• When buying breads and pastas, choose products with the word "whole" as part of the first ingredient (as in "whole grain oats") and with 4 or more grams of dietary fiber per serving (this is known as "The Nancy Rule").  

2.  Plan your meals around what vegetables are in season and locally grown, whenever possible. 

3.  Go for walks after dinner with your children.  This habit will help improve digestion, lower insulin and blood sugar levels, and promote a better night’s sleep.  

Please pass the butternut squash!

In gratitude,

Nancy Heinrich

Founder, Growing Healthy Kids, Inc.

*Ludwig DS, Currie J.  The association between pregnancy weight gain and birthweight: a within-family comparison.  Lancet 2010; 376 (9745): 9840990; Ludwig DS, Rouse HL, Currie J.  Pregnancy weight gain and childhood body weight: a within-family comparison.  PLoS Medicine 2013; 10 (10): ed1001521.

a way to improve visitors weblog!

a way to improve visitors weblog!
the way to boom site visitors on Blogs
how to boom visitors on the weblog in query is the use of the blog Commenting. This method isn't the vintage way or the new way, but the fundamental regulations that need to be implemented by using all of us who's coping with the blog. in case you realize how to use the blog feedback successfully, then you can enhance the rating of your blog. however maximum bloggers commonly ignore this reality.

One manner to improve blog visitors is intentionally written as a shape of sharing the enjoy. so you can get a clear idea and take benefit of weblog commenting to growth your weblog ratings in engines like google. that the real
"Google also study the feedback and index them as content material using the robot crawlers".
take into account the two examples of weblog remark is right on the screenshot beneath:
how to boom weblog visitors - remark
growth weblog site visitors with remarks
the use of feedback and allow others to touch upon our blogs are a clever way to maintain your weblog updated. however to shield your blog web page rank of sharing with others, we have to make our weblog remark hyperlinks nofollow.

growth site visitors to blog Commenting

You is probably wondering that how a comment can help increase blog site visitors, marvel underneath will cast off all doubts and you will realize the actual power of the comment device.
1. permitting readers to comment on the topic become the satisfactory way to have interaction them and build a strong relationship with them constantly.
2. whilst readers depart feedback on the weblog submit, the submit robotically get updated with fresh content material inside the shape of feedback.
3. while readers ask their queries within the comments segment, the remarks they add extra value to the content material. because there are numerous internet customers are seeking out records within the shape of a query. this may help to rank content.
4. solution the questions and update the content material with greater thoughts and solutions, so that your blog posts will look clean and continually alive.

regarding the technical steps for how to increase site visitors on the blog by means of commenting this blog you may do this now with the aid of surfing to find other blogs as lots as possible with the best topic. when leaving a remark, you need to hyperlink your blog URL and you will get nice one way links from blog commenting that increase your weblog visitors fast.

the way to hyperlink link remark blog

simply you can at once placed the URL of your blog as it's far on a line in a comment. but for some bloggers, it could be less ugly should even be a junk mail movement.

the way to maintain URL is not visible and best embedded inside the paper? you could kind the HTML code whilst writing inside the remark box. but it is able to not be easy specially for those of you who do now not apprehend coding. the solution to the web HTML, use CKEditor click right here.

Please write some sentences as you wish for could be used as a comment. Its very clean, as the function weblog posts.

Writing remarks on traffic blog
No remarks visible example sentence containing the phrase hyperlink or anchor textual content. To generate the HTML code, simply click on the source and paste it into the remark box vacation spot. And the end result while we kind the code manually would be like this:


positive it is easy to increase visitors in your blog with blog commenting along with your feedback applicable provisions that aren't detected as junk mail. so that you can generate back links from the blog commenting. therefore, it'll help growth traffic and rank your weblog

Joy of being in the field daily...

Hello Nhaka Friends,

My name is Glenda Takavadii and I work as a Senior Program Officer at Nhaka Foundation. My work is to primarily ensure that our programs are all being implemented according to the agreed plans and timelines.This means that I get to spend a lot of time in the field and I absolutely love it! I am one of those people who easily get bored with monotonous work, so I am thankful that in my work, every day is different from the one before. I plan my work a week in advance and am always guided by the overall Nhaka Program Implementation plan. I mostly enjoy being in the field because the team and I get to implement the programs, converse with communities and see the impact the programs we deliver are making on the ground.

The programs we implement at Nhaka Foundation bring in a lot of value into the meaning of life. Being in the field working alongside poor communities is not for the faint hearted because anything and everything can happen anytime and you have to be proactive, responsive and be sensitive to communities. The roads we use to reach the communities are nothing short of prominent gullies and craters that are on dirt roads. A journey that is supposed to take 30 minutes can easily take twice or thrice as much time due to the effects of gully erosion, non maintenance and the like. The scenery however compensates for the bad roads.  The views are breath taking and sometimes you can temporarily forget about the troubles of the world. 

I remember that on my first field visit at Nhaka Foundation our truck decided to sever the power steering cable just after we had left the city and turning back was not an option for the determined duo. Truth be told I also didn’t want my boss to think I had failed on my first field visit ;). My job also involves field research which entails assessments of the schools and communities we serve, looking at their current needs, their ability to respond and areas in which the team may come in to assist. Some of the schools we work with are in the most vulnerable and poor rural communities. The difficult part about my job, I would say, is keeping my emotions in-check, even when the situation on the ground is dire and you have no idea where the funding will come from to assist or be part of creating a solution together with the communities.

At the end of the day knowing that our programs and collective work with the help from our partners and the high involvement and participation of the guardians and caregivers of children, makes it all worth it. 

Best wishes,

Glenda

news Ellen Pompeo Defends grey's Anatomy's trendy attack on Meredith

news Ellen Pompeo Defends grey's Anatomy's trendy attack on Meredith
If after remaining night's frightening assault on grey's Anatomy, you are involved that the tragedies that usually befall Meredith gray are starting to frame on the incredible, Ellen Pompeo has something she'd like to mention to you.
speaking with the display's government manufacturer Betsy Beers on her podcast Shondaland discovered, Pompeo provided up an interesting protection for the percentages-defying amount of calamity it's made it's manner to her negative person. "You don't suppose you will should give you 12 years of devastating things occurring to at least one character," she admitted. "but, I observe the news each day and read newspapers on-line, and those have had a few pretty unfortunate collection of events happen to them in life. matters that you in no way think would appear. people being at two specific mass shootings. Random, weird matters do show up. Earth is quite an interesting region. So we are able to continually droop our disbelief enough to be able to tell some story and analyze a few instructions."
click on: Why it's time to stop Torturing Meredith on gray's Anatomy

Her clarification aside, Pompeo wasn't without reservations approximately taking up any other bout of grievous damage for Meredith. "the first issue while Debbie [Allen, directing producer] instructed me they were planning this episode, I said, ‘So Meredith is going to be attacked once more? Do you watched the target audience is going to head for that? Are they going with a purpose to take care of that? Hasn't enough took place to Meredith?' and he or she said, ‘it is gonna be splendid. it is gonna be splendid. it's gonna be splendid,'" she discovered. "And, as constantly—listen, if Shonda [Rhimes] thinks something's an amazing concept, it's normally a terrific idea."
Of direction, the character they were given to helm the unique episode didn't harm. "despite the fact that  I had my reservations, i was nevertheless gung-ho to present it the entirety i have, now not having study it," she said. "Then finding out Denzel [Washington] became coming on to direct it, i used to be like, ‘Oh yeah, permit's move. sure, allow's do it.'"
So, what is subsequent for Meredith on her street to recuperation? Pompeo and Beers stayed quiet on that topic, however in a separate interview with Cosmo, the actress revealed that remedy and even relationship are in the titular document's future. "So, after the attack, she goes into remedy, that's an idea that Shonda and i mentioned. after which in remedy, she starts offevolved exploring what it way to be on my own, and [how] she's never by myself, and how by myself does she need to be?" she stated. "we are shifting closer to Meredith dating once more, so anybody has to get ready for it. i can tell you that i've shot a few scenes, even though I do not know where they're going to move, however i've shot a few scenes, and i am very glad and excited with the manner that is unfolding. it is thrilling for Meredith, and it is a few happiness, some mild. i'm hoping we get to hold going to down that direction."
After seeing how dedicated Alex (Justin Chambers) turned into to Meredith all through the whole ordeal—and together with his courting with Jo (Camilla Luddington) in a totally rocky vicinity—ought to this friendship develop into romance? Pompeo remained suspiciously cagey at the challenge. "I do not know how a good deal i'm able to genuinely say—because I don't want to get fired!"
Are you hoping Meredith and Alex get collectively? hold forth within the comments under!
gray's Anatomy airs Thursdays at eight p.m. on ABC.

Education in Zimbabwe

Dear Friends,

The long term impact of the neglect of the education system cannot be under-estimated and will impede Zimbabwe's ability to revive and develop. Adult literacy rates are still estimated at over 90%, but this may plummet to 70% by 2020 if completion rate and quality do not rise or 2nd chance education programmes be offered to youth who have left the school system. Due to the macro economic pressures that are currently obtaining in the country, parents are struggling to pay fees/levies for their children in schools.  According to a new report, http://www.theafricareport.com/Southern-Africa/zimbabwes-education-sector-in-crisis.html,  the dropout rate was 43 percent higher than the previous year. Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM), meant to assist children from poor families with school fees, is failing to cope with the increasing demand. The report gives the dropout figures as 2,289 for secondary and 2,784 for primary of which 52% at secondary and 40% at primary level were females.

Currently the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has been working on a new curriculum whose zero draft has been now a centre of discussion. Besides the discussions on the new curriculum there are also various issues that have been discussed within the Education sector which include the construction of over 2,500 new schools in newly resettled areas so as to increase access to education for all children, training and deployment of qualified early childhood development teachers to schools that have established the required early childhood development classes and increasing awareness and knowledge on the importance of inclusive education and ensuring that children with special education needs are catered for at all times. Organisations that work to promote the education of girls have also been advocating for strategies that promote the retention of students in school especially girls. 

Early Childhood Development

Early childhood education was introduced after independence in 1980 through the National Early Childhood Development (NECD) program which was aimed primarily at pre-school children in rural areas who had never had access to these services. A community development approach underpinned the roll out of the ECD centres. With limited focus on minimum criteria, and lack of capacity at community level to make significant contributions, the standard of facilities and activities varied substantially. There now has been a great improvement in the provision of ECD services in the country through the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education that has made it a priority for resource provision such as deployment of qualified ECD teachers as well as training programs for teachers and parents through the structures.

In 2004, a national review of the education system recommended that ECD be integrated into education structures rather than running parallel to them. A national survey conducted in 2007 indicated that 95 per cent of primary schools had ECD facilities, but among 5,059 preschools surveyed, 61 per cent did not have buildings. MoESAC now estimate that most primary schools (97%) do have some kind of ECD provisions but facilities and resources, especially teachers and associated costs remains a major challenge. By 2015 Zimbabwe seeks to offer two years of ECD education in all primary schools and increase enrolment so that 90% of 5 year old children attend, currently only 48% of 5 year olds do. Concern has been raised over (i) the acute shortage of qualified ECD teachers (a play centred methodology is used which differs from the standard primary school pedagogic approach) and (ii) parental costs, given the high prevailing poverty rates and absence of free or low cost services.

Most schools have no classrooms for the ECD children. The number of children in each class was too large failing to meet the recommended teacher-pupils ratio of 1:20. In most provinces it was found that there was a critical shorted of trained teachers with ECD qualifications. Overall, the ECD A and B classes are being manned by untrained staff (para-professionals) a practice which militates against attainment of quality education. Most primary schools visited lacked age appropriate toilets, WASH facilities and furniture for the 3-5 year old children, play equipment for outdoor area, toys and indoor learning materials. On health and nutrition the analysis revealed that many ECD centres in primary schools did not give children food at school and in some cases the children had no food. Some of the children were infested with soil transmitted helminthiasis [STH) and schistosomiasis (SCH) worm-parasites which affect the growth and development of children.

Conclusion

More still needs to be done to revive the education sector in the country. Financial resources need to be strategically deployed to ensure that students in the country have access to great educational opportunities. At Nhaka Foundation we advocate for equal learning opportunities for all children. We strive to ensure that children have access to education facilities, great teaching as well as quality, holistic programming that supports the total development of a child.

Patrick Makokoro