On World Cleanup Day, UNICEF Sittwe Office organizes environmental action for children

By Chris Schuepp

SITTWE, RAKHINE STATE, 15 September 2018 - The UNICEF Field Office in Sittwe, Rakhine State, organized a significant clean-up of the local beach on World Cleanup Day 2018. More than 300 participants from UNICEF, people in the local community and international partners in Sittwe and came together during the weekend to clean a six kilometre stretch of beach in the capital of Rakhine State.

“Supporting the provision of clean and safe areas for children is one of our priorities. We set a sign by inviting our partners and the community in Sittwe to join us on World Clean-up Day and translate our words into action together,” said Mandie Alexander, Chief of Field Office for UNICEF in Sittwe. “We are grateful for the support from the local municipality in the proper disposal of the garbage we collected on the beach.”

မိခင္ႏွင့္ကေလးျပဳစုေစာင့္ေရွာက္မႈ အသိပညာမ်ားေပးျခင္းျဖင့္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ေက်းလက္ေဒသမ်ားရွိ ကေလးသူငယ္မ်ားထံ ေရာက္ရွိျခင္း

*အလက္စ္ဇႏၵာ၀င္းေရးသာသည္

မဂ်ီးဆိပ္၊ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ - ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ေတာင္ႀကီးၿမိဳ႕ကို မိခင္နွင့္ကေလးက်န္းမာေရး ျပႆနာဆုိင္ရာ အခ်က္အလက္ေတြေကာက္ယူဖုိ႔ ခရီးသြားခဲ့တဲ့ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္အဖြဲ႕၀င္တစ္ေယာက္အေနျဖင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ရဲ႕ အဓိကတာ၀န္ကေတာ့ ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ က်န္းမာေရးအဖြဲ႕မ်ား၊ မိခင္မ်ားနွင့္ ကေလးမ်ားကို ေတြ႔ဆံု ေမးျမန္းျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေတာင္ႀကီးကေန အင္းေလးကန္ကို တစ္နာရီၾကာ ကားနဲ႔သြားေရာက္ၿပီး ေနာက္ထပ္ မိနစ္ေလးဆယ္ ေလွစီးၿပီးတဲ့အခါမွာေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔အဖြဲ႕ဟာ မဂ်ီးဆိပ္လို႔ေခၚတဲ့ ရြာေလးမွာရွိတဲ့ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္က ေထာက္ပံ့ထားတဲ့ အစိုးရက်န္းမာေရးေဆးခန္းကို ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

The local health team standing outside the health office receiving UNICEF health team in Magyi Seik village, Shan State.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Alexander Win

Reaching children in rural areas of Shan State by providing maternal and child care knowledge

By Alexander Win*

MAGYI SEIK, SHAN STATE - As a member of the team from UNICEF that travelled to Taunggyi Town in Shan State, for data collection on issues of maternal and child health in the area, my main role was to interview local health teams, mothers and children.  After an hour of driving towards Inle Lake from Taunggyi and after forty minutes of boat ride, our team finally reached a government health facility supported by UNICEF located in a village called Magyi Seik.

The local health team standing outside the health office receiving UNICEF health team in Magyi Seik village, Shan State.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Alexander Win

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္အေရွ႕ပိုင္းတြင္ ဗဟုသုတ တိုးပြားရရိွလာျခင္းက မိခင္မ်ားအတြက္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ ေဆာင္က်ဥ္းေပး

၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ အေရွ႕ပိုင္းရိွ ဝမ္ပန္အခါ ေက်းရြာရိွ မိခင္မ်ားသည္ အာဟာရႏွင့္ မိခင္၊ ေမြးကင္းစႏွင့္ ကေလးက်န္းမာေရးဆိုင္ရာ ဝန္ေဆာင္မွဳမ်ား စတင္ရရိွခဲ႔သည္။ ယင္းအာဟာရႏွင့္ က်န္းမာေရးအစီအစဥ္မ်ားသည္ ကေလးေတြကို ၾကီးထြားဖြံ႔ျဖိဳးေစဖို႔ အေျပာင္းအလဲမ်ားကို ျဖစ္ေစျခင္းႏွင့္ မသက္သက္ေအာင္ကဲ႔သို႔ မိခင္မ်ားေပ်ာ္ရြင္ေနရသည့္ အခ်က္တစ္ခ်က္လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္အေရွ႕ပိုင္း က်ိဳင္းတံုရိွ ဝမ္ပန္အခါ ေက်းရြာ၏ ေက်းရြာအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴးအိမ္ေရွ႕တြင္ ကေလးငယ္ေလး အိသက္မြန္ႏွင့္ သူမ၏မိခင္တို႔သည္ ၾကီးထြားမွဳအေျခအေန တိုင္းတာဆန္းစစ္ရန္ ေစာင္႔ဆိုင္းေနစဥ္။ 
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Nyan Zay Htet

ေရးသားသူ - ထက္ထက္ဦး

က်ိဳင္းတံု၊ ၂၀၁၈ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇူလိုင္လ - မသက္သက္ေအာင္ အခ်ိန္ျပည့္မိခင္တစ္ေယာက္မျဖစ္ခင္ သူမသည္ ေက်ာင္းဆရာမတစ္ဦး ျဖစ္ခဲ႔သည္။ “ကၽြန္မ ရဲေမတစ္ဦးျဖစ္ခ်င္ခဲ႔တာ၊ ကၽြန္မထင္တာက အဲဒီဝတ္စံုက ယံုၾကည္မွဳကို တိုးပြားေစတယ္။”ဟု မသက္သက္ေအာင္မွ ျပံဳး၍ေျပာသည္။ “ကၽြန္မမိခင္တစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္ျပီး ေနာက္မွာေတာ႔ ကၽြန္မသမီးေလးကို ေစာင္႔ေရွာက္ရတယ္၊ ကၽြန္မအေမကို အိမ္အလုပ္ေတြကူညီေပးျပီး ရပ္ရြာလူထု ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲေတြမွာ ပါဝင္ေလ႔ရိွပါတယ္။”

Access to knowledge brings hope to mothers in eastern Shan State

In 2017, mothers in the small Wan Pan Akhar village in eastern Shan State began accessing nutrtion and Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) services. These nutrtion and health programmes are now changing how children are raised and have become a reason of happiness for mothers like Ma Thet Thet Aung.

Little Ei Thet Mon and her mother wait at the growth monitoring session at their village head’s residence in Wan Pan Akhar village in Keng Tung, eastern Shan State.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Nyan Zay Htet

By Htet Htet Oo

KENG TUNG, July 2018 - Before Ma Thet Thet Aung became a full-time mother, she used to work as a teacher. “But, I really wanted to become a police woman. I think the uniform exude confidence,” says Ma Thet Thet Aung with a smile. “Ever since I became a mother, I look after my daughter; help my mother with house chores and take part in our community group discussions.” 

က်န္းမာေရးအသိပညာေပး ရရိွျခင္းအားျဖင့္ ကေလးမ်ားဘဝတိုးတက္ျမင့္မားလာေစျခင္း

ေရးသားသူ - ထက္ထက္ဦး

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၊ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္တြင္ ကေလးငယ္မ်ားအား က်န္းမာေရးႏွင့္ ညီညႊတ္သည့္ အစားအစာေကၽြးျခင္း အေၾကာင္းကို က်န္းမာေရး ပညာေပးသူမ်ားမွ ရိုးရွင္းစြာသရုပ္ျပ

တစ္ႏွစ္ေအာက္ကေလးႏွင့္ ကေလးငယ္မ်ားအား အစာေကၽြးျခင္းအေလ႔အထအၾကာင္းကို မိခင္မ်ားအား ရပ္ရြာလူထုအုပ္စုလုိက္ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ သားဖြားဆရာမ မေအးေအးေအာင္မွ ဦးေဆာင္ေဆြးေႏြးစဥ္။
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Nyan Zay Htet

က်ိဳင္းတံု၊ ၂၀၁၈ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇူလိုင္လ - ဝမ္ပန္အခါ ရြာေလးသည္ ေသးငယ္သည့္ရြာေလးတစ္ရြာျဖစ္ျပီး  ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္အေရွ႔ပိုင္း က်ိဳင္းတံုျမိဳ႕မွ တစ္ဆင့္ စိမ္းလန္းသည့္လယ္ကြင္းမ်ားကို ျဖတ္ကာ မညီညာသည့္ လမ္းမမ်ားမွ တစ္နာရီခန္႔ ကားစီးလွ်င္ ေရာက္ႏိုင္ပါသည္။ ထိုရြာတြင္ မေအးေအးေအာင္သည္ အသက္ (၁)ႏွစ္အရြယ္ သားျဖစ္သူ ေကာင္းထိုက္စံ အပါအဝင္ မိသားစုႏွင့္အတူ ေနထိုင္လွ်က္ရိွသည္။ ၂၀၁၇ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ယူနီဆက္ပံ႔ပိုးမွဳျဖင့္ က်န္းမာေရးႏွင့္ အားကစားဝန္ၾကီးဌာနသည္ အာဟာရ၊  မိခင္၊ ေမြးကင္းစႏွင့္ ကေလးက်န္းမာေရးဆိုင္ရာ သင္တန္းမ်ား ပံ႔ပိုးေပးျခင္းအစီအစဥ္ကို ေစတနာ႔ဝန္ထမ္း က်န္းမာေရးလုပ္သားမ်ားအတြက္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ အေရွ႕ပိုင္းတြင္ စတင္ခဲ႔သည္။ ယင္းသင္တန္းအခြင့္အလမ္းသည္ သူမရြာသုိ႔ ေရာက္လာသည့္အတြက္ မေအးေအးေအာင္တစ္ေယာက္ ပထမဆံုးေသာ ေစတနာ႔ဝန္ထမ္းတစ္ဦး ျဖစ္လာခဲ႔သည္။ “လြန္ခဲ႔ေသာ သံုးလခန္႔က အရန္သားဖြားဆရာမ သင္တန္းကို စာရင္းသြင္းခဲ႔ပါတယ္။ အခုေတာ႔ အဲဒီဗဟုသုတေတြကို ကၽြန္မ ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္မွာရိွတဲ႔ မိခင္ေတြအတြက္ကို ျပန္လည္ေဝမွ်ဖို႔ စိတ္အားထက္သန္မဳွ အျပည့္ရိွေနပါတယ္”ဟု မေအးေအးေအာင္မွ ေျပာသည္။ 

Improving the lives of children by providing access to health education

By Htet Htet Oo

In Shan State of Myanmar, health educators demonstrate simple but healthy child feeding methods 

Ma Aye Aye Aung serves as a passionate health worker for her community, takes charge in weighing children to monitor their growth in Wan Pan (Akhar) Village in Keng Tung, Eastern Shan.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Nyan Zay Htet

KENG TUNG, July 2018 - Wan Pan Akhar is a small village, an hour of bumpy ride across the green paddy fields from Keng Tung town in eastern Shan State. Here is where Ma Aye Aye Aung lives with her family including her one-year-old boy, Kaung Htike San. In 2017, UNICEF started supporting the Ministry of Health and Sports to provide trainings on nutrition and MNCH practices for volunteer health workers in eastern Shan State. When the training opportunity came to her village, Ma Aye Aye Aung was one of the first to volunteer. “I enrolled to the auxiliary midwife training three months ago. Now, I have a strong passion to give back this knowledge to mothers like me in my community,” says Ma Aye Aye Aung.