November has been a busy and important month for Roots of Health. Since my last blog update, we completed our needs assessment. In analyzing the data as well as our general observations from being in the communities, we have decided to begin our programs and service delivery in a community in Santa Lourdes called “Pulang Lupa” (meaning “red earth”) which is a part of Purok Matahimik. It is the community that I mentioned before that is also referred to simply as “Dumpsite”. Based on the income and size of the local families as well as health and nutrition patterns, education levels and knowledge on reproductive health, Pulang Lupa is clearly the most underserved community and we believe they will benefit greatly from our programs.

Upon selecting Pulang Lupa as our first program site, we mapped all the households within the location and spent 4 days conducting in-depth surveys within every household in the community.

View the photos of the Pulang Lupa.

Number of households – 59

Number of people living within the 59 households – 315 (average of 5.3 individuals per household)

Percentage of households with access to their own toilet facility – 61%

Percentage of households with access to their own electricity – 44%

Percentage of households with connection to their own supply of water – 5%   (95% of the people in the community do not have their own connection to a water supply and have to walk down a steep hill to collect water from a well for bathing and cleaning and they buy water directly from a water company for drinking and cooking).

100% of the respondents live in homes made of nipa or thatch, and 95% of the houses have only one room for all of the inhabitants to share.

42% of the respondents do not have a job.

The average salary in the community is around P3,330 ($66). However, this figure is skewed because of outliers– two households have a monthly income of around P10,000 ($200) and many more have a monthly income between P500 ($10) and P1000 ($20).

Less than 30% of the respondents practice some form of family planning.

62% of respondents said that the ideal number of children is either 2 or 3.

Only 54% of respondents have been pregnant 3 times or less.

Of the remaining women, 8 (13.5%) have been pregnant 4 times. 3 women (5%) have been pregnant 5 times. 6 women (10%) have been pregnant 6 times.  3 respondents (5%) have been pregnant 7 times. 2 women (3%) have been pregnant 8 times.  3 respondents (5%) have been pregnant 9 times. 2 women (3%) of respondents have been pregnant 10 times and 1 woman has been pregnant 12 times.

Nearly all births are at home with a traditional healer as a birth attendant.

10 women have had no formal schooling in their lives. 17 women went to anywhere from 1st to 5th grade in elementary school. 14 women went up to the 6th grade and completed elementary school. 9 women had some high school education but only 5 women actually graduated from high school. 1 woman went up to her second year in college, and 3 women completed vocational or secretarial school.

All of the women have experienced difficulty in feeding their families, and very few can afford to buy meat or fish. Most women reported eating rice with either eggplant, kangkong (a type of spinach), plantains or casava when we asked them to tell us everything they had eaten the day before we interviewed them.