NGITING TAGUMPAY PROJECT

NGITING TAGUMPAY PROJECT: I have done many physical exams in Day Care Centers & Elementary Schools in Mansalay. By far the biggest health problem is dental decay. For that reason, I begun teaching the youngest children in the schools how to brush and take care of their teeth. As an incentive we are giving each child in those classes a toothbrush & toothpaste and actually have them use it during the teaching. This Healthy Teeth Campaign is for every Day Care Centers & Elementary Schools in the Municipality of Mansalay.

Bayanihan Bloodletting Activity

4th Infantry Battalion of Philippine Army showed its bayanihan spirit through the recently held Blood Letting Activity organized by OMBC (Oriental Mindoro Blood Council) under the office of Vice Governor Bonz Dolor with the help of Mansalay RHU with its slogan "Dugo mo, Buhay ko".

GO! Make a Difference.

        It is ironic how people of different interests and fields are able to meet and unite together for the same cause.

           January 3, 2013 was definitely not a typical day for me. Waking up early and waiting for the wonderful day ahead of me just made me even more excited. It was a day full of love and compassion. Something that I rarely encounter in my everyday life. This day has been marked wonderfully and I’m glad that once again together with Foursquare Youth volunteers, we became an instrument of God to be of service to others through Feeding Program & Healthy Teeth Campaign organized by Keep Hope Alive Volunteer’s Foundation and Vogs Privado.

         We overcame several uphill roads and the hard ones required our efforts by clinging and jumping at the rear part of our feet. It was a long walk from the Sitio Matucao to the Quinomay Mangyan Community. No matter how calm or angry the weather is, the place is always winding. It seemed to be an endless walk. Let me tell you that transporting the goods have not been easy. We took the chance of resting on flat surfaces that we saw along the trail. The long walk was exhausting but the environment seemed to soothe our weary bodies. The soothing noise of a river added to our excitement. It was 5:45 PM when we finally reached community. It was almost dark and figures of kids and Mangyan residents were all over the place.

          Early next day, January 4, 2013 was indeed very heartwarming for me and for the rest of us who were there. Everyone recharged with snacks and steal a few Zzzs. The community was very remote so it’s a bit hard to prepare the food. And the cooking process is very much manual: the fire setting, the boiling process, and all. We thank our cooks (Pas Janice, Siara & Ate Elaine) whom beyond our stressful yesterday were able to cook the food properly ;). Despite the tiring preparation, it paid off upon seeing the overwhelming reception of residents. The children were very eager to see what we had prepared for them.  We delivered the macaroni soup to the kids while others were preparing the brushes and toothpastes for Healthy Teeth education. We chit chatted with some kids and interviewed them. Some were quite shy but the others were very fun. Bonding with those children in Quinomay Mangyan Community made me appreciate things around me, especially God's countless blessings that I did not pay much attention to before. The fulfillment I had when I looked upon their happy faces was exhilarating. It was very fulfilling that in our own simple ways; we were able to help and made the children feel that some people care for them through a feeding activity. Even though it only lasted for a day, the laughter we shared would always remain in my heart. It was neither the food nor the toothbrush we gave that made the outreach memorable but the smiles in every child's face which made it more valuable.

             It’s not the first time for me to do this kind of thing and the feeling is just so priceless. Do you ever get that feeling of pride because you are considered as a blessing to other people? Just by being there and feeding the kids made me realize what kind of impact I myself had given them. I love the fact that God sent us to them to bring forth happiness and be a blessing. Whenever one of them thanks us for the simple food and toothbrush we brought them, I felt a hundred times gratified. Even my friends and fellow volunteers felt their sincerity and, with joy in their eyes, realized that this Feeding Program & Healthy Teeth Campaign is more than just a community outreach for us. It is a self-entitled volunteerism to share the love of Christ and cheer others. It just feels so refreshing to see those Mangyan kids happy with such little things in life. I mean, I’ve been there and I will do anything worth it to feel that such thing again. You’re only a kid once, cherish it.

             For my fellow youth volunteers, we may not be the kindest persons in the world but we have a heart kind enough to share the simple things that we’re lucky that we have. No matter how simple the ways and how small the amount, it is the willingness and joyfulness to share that counts. Through this simple activity, we were able to convey the message to the children and to their parents that if they strive harder in life, there will be more people who will be willing to help them.So guys, if you have any doubts of volunteering for a cause, then do it, not for the sake of being with friends or just forced to, but to be compassionate for others. I guarantee, you will feel the same feeling as mine.

            Praise God for moments like this! I hope we’d be able to do another one again and again to continue  spreading His grace and reach out more to other helpless people. LET’S GO and MAKE A DIFFERENCE :)

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We have a great need for sponsors for our Healthy Teeth Campaign and Feeding Programs

Can you help us?

As a Sponsor, you will become part of a group whose combined efforts make it possible for our volunteers, to share the blessings, teach the Word of God and feed the children. For inquiries and questions about Sponsorship and Donating, just contact one of the Core team members through Facebook account.

'In His Steps' Medical Mission - Mansalay, Oriental Mindoro

Patient outside Medicare Hospital

Eyes and fingers probed the chainlink fence surrounding Mansalay Gymnasium, Mansalay, and Oriental Mindoro. From the air, the hundreds of people gathered in the sun looked like a town fair. In reality, they were in the middle of a multi-day wait for free medical and dental care.

The Team

In one day, a team of 50+ doctors, nurses and supporting volunteers from United States, Manila, Iloilo and Mansalay performed 100+ surgeries, invited 1000+ patients into the medical mission area and Medicare Hospital and provided 200+ people with dental care. The main stakeholder for this mission is the “In His Steps” medical ministry from Texas, U.S.A. with the effort of our very own Doc Celia Maliwanag and of course the local government.

Doc Cel Maliwanag

Aniway Cusi, a member of Mangyan Hanunuo tribe and a mother of two-year-old Mikoy, said she and his son waited for hours to get into the free medical mission after traveling about a half hour from their home in town proper. She pointed at Mikoy’s face, which had a minor case of scabies and white patch near his eye. The sun had irritated it.

Aniway and her son, Mikoy

Now that they were entertained, an answer was near. A simple check-up, injection and medicines would solve what a quack doctor had told them many months ago he could not treat.

“It’s a relief having doctors come here that can do what the doctors can’t do in Mansalay,” Cusi said. “I just want the doctors to be able to fix it so my son’s illness can grow up and be healthy.”

Volunteer Doctor from Africa

Mikay’s story is one of thousands. There is the old man who walked hours to gain sight through free eyeglasses, and then returned after few hours year just to say thank you. There is the teenage girl who had her hands tumor removed after years of agonizing it so badly.

Collecting Patient Data

Taking Vital Signs

Each resident’s vital signs were first taken before they could proceed to the doctor. Medical complaints ranged from fever, cough or colds to hypertension or diabetes. There were also varied patients, from a day-old baby to an eighty-ish grandmother. After the doctor examined them, they were given the appropriate medication. Or, if they needed more intervention, they were referred to the nearest hospital via ambulance. Some clients however went to the medical mission without any ailment to complain. They said that they were just there to ask for multivitamins which they have rightly received.

Ongoing surgery

Working doctors and nurses

After a few minutes of resting, we went back our posts. I am assigned to surgery. Cries burst and tears flowed as the vaccinations began and blood pressure apparatus pumped and whistled. It was a bit tiresome but all worth it. The smiles and the words of thanks are all you need to wipe the sweat dry and boost you energy back to normal. These are the times when I definitely tell myself I love my profession.

Senior citizens

“We have found that much of the need exists in the countryside where people don’t necessarily have the money or cultural inclination to go into the big cities,” said Medical Mission Director. “As a result, those needs are unmet.”

Team Nurses

It’s weird but it’s amazing how on the mission field and doing God’s work everything seems to disappear. Worries, anxieties, and things that seemed to matter don’t really anymore. God has a funny way of reprioritizing your life but if we’re honest it never really stays like that after the God rush is gone.

Medical Volunteers

Team RNHeals 

Team Manila Nurses

New Friends

Access to healthcare should never be exclusive to those who can afford and to those who are living near the source of medications, etc. So, clap clap for activities like this. I’m so looking forward to the next. Everyone can make a difference in his/her own little ways. I hope to start changing the world. -shernan

Find solutions to some of life's difficult problems

      

 We live in troubled times, from personal issues to world crises, economic challenges to challenging relationships. Stress has become a common part of our everyday lives. Some individuals manage to cope and keep things in healthy perspective. For others, these challenges can result in unhealthy reactions like anxiety, depression, and even alcohol abuse. However, it's often hard to judge when normal feelings of worry, fear, and stress cross the line and become a serious condition that impacts both your emotional and physical health. With proper evaluation, anxiety disorders are treatable. Through medication or psychological therapy, or both, they can be brought under control.

     The good news is that there are real solutions to these serious issues. Understanding why someone is anxious, depressed, or abusing alcohol is the first step. Knowing the treatment options—both medical and therapeutic—is critical to resolving these difficult problems. If you have ever suffered from depression or been close to someone who has, you know that this illness cannot be wished away or relieved at will. Depression can have enormous depth and staying power, but there are a variety of medications and treatments that provide real help. A recent study showed that for those who stuck with treatment, depression lifted completely in seven out of 10 people, and others experienced relief of many symptoms. But discovering which treatment options work best requires knowledge and perseverance.

It’s possible to die of a broken heart!

According to recent studies, it’s possible to die from heart failure after an intense emotional event! It’s called Stress Cardiomyopathy. It happens when emotional events such as death or divorce cause adrenaline levels in the body to rise to such high levels for days on end that the heart begins to die.

Stress hormones are so high that they begin to “stun” the heart into failure. The occurrence was often misdiagnosed as a heart attack. Researchers found that, even though symptoms are similar, they are slightly different conditions.

Because of the massive amounts of continuous adrenaline, or epinephrine, from emotional events the body can experience chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and even heart failure.(http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org)

 

Why You Look Different in Photos Than You Do in the Mirror?

        Yesterday morning, you looked good. Yesterday evening, before you went out, you're pretty sure you looked real good. So who the hell is this schlub in the Facebook album from last night, tagged with your name?

         It's a phenomenon nestled somewhere between universal annoyance and urban legend: People see something different in the mirror than they do in photographs. More often than not, the former is controlled, predictable and palatable, while the latter is an endless source of nasty little surprises.

So, why the disparity? The answer is complicated, but it boils down to this: Your eyes, your brain, your mirror and your camera are all conspiring to sabotage your body image.

It's the camera

         The camera adds ten pounds! At a certain point, this obscure TV adage became folk wisdom. While this particular effect probably refers specifically to television, and in particular the distorting effect of the convex curvature of older TV sets, it seems to hold true for regular folks, sometimes in still pictures as well as video.

          Cameras sensors may be absorbing the same photons as our eyes, but they're doing so through a complex lens that can actually change the way you look. Most cameras, from the dumpiest point-and-shoots to high-end DSLRs, ship with lenses capable of adjusting to wide, zoom-ed out perspective, and tight, zoomed-in views. At both extremes, the lens plays weird—and potentially ugli-fying tricks.

        A wide angle lens does as its name suggests, capturing an image spread over a wide angle. The field of view in a wide-angle shot is wide—wider than that of your own eyes. In pulling this off, some lenses create a sort of fisheye effect, which can bloat subjects in the middle, and stretch those on the outside. This, however, is instantly recognizable, and probably won't cause too much anxiety. In other words, If the shot looks like a still from an episode of Jackass, you probably shouldn't let it figure into your self-image too much.

        But there's a subtler effect of wide lenses called wide-angle distortion: Since the field of view is super-wide, objects close to the camera will seem large, while objects just a bit further away will seem very small. Here's a scene from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels that illustrates the effect, starting a 4:18. (NSFW, sorta.)

        The net effect is an illusion of size, both width and height. Subtle, sure, but it's there.

Telephoto lenses are usually seen as more flattering, giving the impression that the subject is flattened, and slightly compressing the width of your foremost features, like your nose or breasts. So you might want to think twice before fleeing the pesky paparazzi and their fancy zoom lenses; it's the tourist with the pocket cam whose snaps will make you look fat on the Internet.

       Lens distortion isn't the only way a camera can screw with your visage. Flash illuminates subjects harshly, turning elegant faces normally accented by soft shadows into a flat, shadowless, cadaveric horror shows.

      Whether these effects are annoying or used to advantage, they mean that what you see in photos is different than what you see in the mirror.

It's the Mirror

          I don't mean to imply that the camera is the only liar, here, because mirrors are just as guilty. For one, they flip your image. The You you're most familiar with, then, is actually an exact opposite of how you look to others. Granted, it's an intuitive reversal, so it doesn't bother us when we see it, but it implants a self-image that's intrinsically wrong.

       On top of that, there's the problem of perspective. People stand close to mirrors, but see their whole selves. This provides a reasonable perspective, but a unique one: it's the perspective of a person standing near to you, eyes proportionately closer to your head than to your feet. This is the perspective of a partner in conversation, not a photographer. Looking a certain way from three feet away doesn't mean you'll look the same from 15.

It's you

      The physics of lenses and mirrors offer solutions to specific problems, i.e. OH MY GOD SO THAT'S WHY MY WONDERFUL BUTT LOOKS SO FAT ON FILM! However, these explanations don't speak to a more relatable weirdness about photography. It's a feeling of uncanniness. It's a sense that something about the photographed self seems unquantifiably different than the mirrored self. It's in your head.

       Think about the act of looking on a mirror. It's incredibly limited You pretty much need to be facing forward, or else you can't see. You will always be looking slightly down at the rest of your body. You will pose for yourself, to achieve the most flattering look. You will hide fat behind folds of clothes, or minimize a strange facial feature with a tilt of the head.

        Other people, including photographers, don't see this version of you. They see a version that you are rarely privy to, and that can seem wildly foreign to our ingrained sensibilities. As Slate explains, it's a bit like how people hate their own voices on tape, doubly so because we know that those foreign, goofball intonations represent that way that everyone else hears us. In photos, we see ourselves in various states of motion, in different contortions and from uncaring, neutral perspectives. Lenses may distort, sure, but in a powerful way, these uncomfortable photographs are closer to reality than our carefully images in the mirror.  (J. Herrman, gizmodo.com)

RN Heals Batch 3: 13,000 Nurses, Midwives to be Deployed Next Month

         The Department of Health (DOH) announced yesterday that 10,000 nurses and 3,000 midwives will be deployed next month to the various provinces in the Philippines to augment the inadequate nursing workforce in DOH hospitals and other health facilities of local government units.

        According to the report, the government deployed the first batch of 10,000 nurses last year and another batch of 11,500 nurses and 1,000 midwives last November.

        This year 2012, the recruitment of 10,000 nurses and 3,000 midwives is already ongoing and is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

        “The recruitment and selection shall be done by the respective Center for Health Development (CMDs) to be completed by February,” the DOH said. 

         Under the RN Heals 3 program, newly hired nurses and midwives shall undergo general orientation scheduled on the first week of March before the actual deployment.

       Those who were previously hired under the same program and rendered satisfactory services until the end of their contract next week can re-apply. (Nursingcrib.com)

Helpful Dengue Tips

Dengue Prevention Checklist

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To prevent the spread of dengue fever, you must first prevent the breeding of its vector, the Aedes mosquito. The Aedes mosquito is easily identifiable by its distinctive black and white stripes on their body. It prefers to breed in clean, stagnant water easily found in our homes. You can get rid of the Aedes mosquito by frequently checking and removing stagnant water in your premises.

The guidelines below will give you an overview of how you can prevent the Aedes mosquito from breeding. 

At all times

v     Turn pails and watering cans over and store them under shelter.

v     Remove water in plant pot plates. Clean and scrub the plate thoroughly to remove mosquito eggs. Avoid the use of plant pot plates, if possible.

v     Loosen soil from potted plants to prevent the accumulation of stagnant water on the surface of the hardened soil.

v     Do not block the flow of water in scupper drains along common corridors in HDB estates. Avoid placing potted plants and other paraphernalia over the scupper drains.

v     Cover rarely used gully traps. Replace the gully trap with non-perforated ones and install anti-mosquito valves.

v     Cover bamboo pole holders after use. Rainwater can potentially accumulate in these bamboo pole holders if they are uncovered and create a habitat.

v     No tray or receptacles should be placed beneath and or/ on top of any air-conditioning unit so as not to create a condition favourable for mosquito breeding.

Every other day

v     Change water in flower vases. Clean and scrub the inner sides of vases. Wash roots of flowers and plants thoroughly as mosquito eggs can stick to them easily.

Once a week

v     Clear fallen leaves and stagnant water in your scupper drains and garden. These leaves could collect water or cause blockages to the drains, thus resulting in the buildup of stagnant water.  . v     Clear any stagnant water in your air cooler unit.

Once a month

v     Add prescribed amounts of sand granular insecticide into vases, gully traps and roof gutters, even if they are dry.

v     Clear away fallen leaves in roof gutters and apron drains. If structurally feasible, remove the roof gutters.

 

ADDITIONAL TIPS

Dengue can be a deadly disease once you contract the virus. To keep you and your loved ones safe, best to make sure your house is dengue-proof by following these simple steps:

1. Do not allow mosquitoes to breed. Stagnant water, or water that has been left to stand for more than 3 days, is a breeding ground for mosquitoes so it is important to clear stagnant water in places where water collects: drainages, flower pots, unused swimming pools, fountains, ponds, etc.

2. Ward off mosquitoes by lighting mosquito coils or lighting citronella-scented candles. Not fond of smoke? Electric mosquito repellant and topical insect repellant (sprays and lotions) are available in the market.

3. Block off mosquito entry points. Repair holes in window and door screens and use mosquito netting in the bedroom, especially around very young children.

4. Kill mosquitoes using electric mosquito killers or rechargeable insect swatters available at your local hardware. For greater effectivity, especially in extreme infestations, have your house fogged. Do-it-yourself insecticides are available commercially but professional services are also listed in the directory. Be sure fogging is done when no one is at home. Leave the house empty for several hours to allow the chemicals to settle.

Follow the anti-dengue tips above to keep the dengue virus away from your household. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

(Anna Katrina Lagman http://www.myproperty.ph)

References:

http://www.nea.gov.sg

Anti-Dengue Information Drive

In an effort to prevent the surging number of dengue cases in our Barangay, I conducted  school health information drive on Wednesday (September 1, 2010) to mobilized the National perspective  in stepping up its goal on dengue prevention and control.
Salvacion Elementary School principal in Maliwanag, Mansalay Oriental Mondoro, Mrs. Elcana Gamol along with the teachers are actively joining and supporting the  information drive following the surging number of dengue cases in the country, particularly in our area where 2 mortalities were reported.
The targeted participants in the drive are school teachers and pupils, particularly those children living in the remote area where mosquitoes are prevalent.