Indigenous Adoloscent Girls Health Awareness Program at CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS

Its my pleasure to share with my World Pulse sisters that I have succesfully completed my summer project on \"Indigenous Adoloscent girls health awareness program\".

I had done the project at Chittagong Hill Tracts consist of Khagrachari, Bandarban and Rangamati located in southeastern Bangladesh, where more than 13 underprivileged Indigenous Communities making up only 1 percent of the overall population of Bangladesh. Though the Government, several INGOs and NGO’s are working in different remote areas to provide basic health care and have initiated many community based development activities such as making them aware of nutrition, sanitation, necessity of vaccination, maintenance of household hygiene, HIV, breast cancer etc., often they fail to reach the young girls or adolescents. Discussing about menstruation, abortion, women’s sexual health, teen pregnancy, infections, birth control, using sanitary napkins are often considered as taboo and young girls often don’t express their problems related to their health, even though they may have had preventable problems that have resulted in serious morbidity or even death at a young age after seeking an unsafe abortion. We hoped to empower the local adolescent girls and their community members through our intervention so that they can live healthier lives and have more equal chances to reach their life potential.The learning objectives of this project include acquainting Indigenous Adolescent girls with sexual and reproductive health, enhancing skills working in sensitive issues considering ethical and health factors, improving communication, public speaking, engaging with conservative indigenous Communities by field activities. Our target groups have educated about their own body and especially reproductive health after this project and a positive attitude will come regarding sexual and reproductive health among them. They will be able to express their difficulties to health workers and collaborating school teachers during the adolescent period without any hesitation.

Conducting workshop in a conservative society was a challenging factor for us to overcome but the girls were very much cooperative and as my fellow mates.Some of the indigenous boys and girls volunteered with me inviting and informing the girls from schools and villages. Then we started with collecting the survey and done workshops in the respective villages including providing the incentives (sanitary napkins).