Dr. Maureen McCall has been visiting SMD. While here, she's been asked to check a number of our students (one case of pneumonia) and our staff. Maureen's pretty thorough, so she's been checking for anything else that may be causing our kids and staff to feel unwell.

In the past year, we've had four cases of TB, so we've been concerned about baseline nutrition and when Dr. McCall noticed that some children were very underweight, we started to talk about which groups would be presenting as underweight (we guessed it would be new kids and maybe the nuns and monks). Maureen thought it would be useful to do a growth survey (height and weight) and then compare the results with World Health Organization statistics.

Saturday December 23 was SMD's (and the monks') day. Dr. McCall, along with our Health Worker Balkumari and many volunteers (Seniors, especially those studying to become Health Assistants) did the measuring and weighing in the two rooms in the school that are somewhat warm. Every student who came to the survey was given a banana, sponsored by Dr. McCall, who was disappointed that only two monks came.

Preliminary results show that many children are very underweight. We will tabulate and graph the results for publication and then will be looking at the diet.