Liberal TN Bloggers

Even though the meet-up has been cancelled, I wonder if we still want to meet.  What say you?

Milking It for All It’s Worth

America, I am an idiot!

I just realized that tomorrow, a surgeon will be cutting a small slit at the base of my neck.  Go ahead, run your finger right down the front of your neck to the place where it meets your chest.  Slowly.  Slowly.

SEE?!

Am I going to have the best time demurely asking folks to kiss it and make it better or what?!

Even Babies Get the Blues

Rachel over at Women’s Health News and I serve on the same board.  Ha, in fact, I kind of feel like the most important thing I did for that Board is to realize that they didn’t really need me on it, they needed Rachel.

Anyway, the Board oversees the Center which oversees this program–the Maternal Infant Health Outreach Worker (MIHOW) program–that I am madly in love with.  You can read the website yourself, but to make a long story short, MIHOW gets invited into communities that hear about it to train regular women who are already trusted women in the community to provide structured guidance to expecting and young mothers in their communities.

It’s the kind of program it’s easy for me to love, first, because it’s effective.  Families that work with the MIHOW program get health insurance, adequate prenatal care, and they tend to breastfeed.  Their kids go to the doctor more regularly and women in the MIHOW program tend to have fewer children spaced farther apart than other women in their communities.

Second, I love it because it’s not a bunch of well-meaning folks from far away going into a community and trying to “fix” things.  MIHOW must be invited into the community by the folks already there and the MIHOW workers are women in the communities who are already the women folks tend to turn to for advice.  This is just making sure that they have the best information they can for how to help promote health in their communities.

Third, I love it because MIHOW is in some of the most isolated communities in the South.  Last night, we learned that MIHOW has been invited into Itta Bena, MS (for those of you who remember your Mississippi history, you’ll remember that Itta Bena is the birthplace of B.B. King, James Bevel, and Marion Barry.  You’ll also remember that Robert Johnson was poisoned in a juke joint just south of town there.  It’s in the same county as Greenwood, where Johnson ultimately died, and Money, where Emmitt Till was killed.  In the whole county, there are 38,000 people.) and Big Ugly, West Virginia, which is an unincorporated town up in the mountains, that even Google Maps could not find.  But in these communities, it’s the community members who are trained to help each other.

Anyway, it’s a great program and I love it and, if I had a million dollars, I would fund it.  But I don’t.  So, I’m telling you about it, instead, because one of the things the MIHOW workers try to do is to take a book with them to each meeting with a family and to leave it for the kids.  I assume that these are picture books or simple books for young childred to either read themselves or have read to them by a parent or older sibling.

Well, the MIHOW workers have been wondering if there are books out there, appropriate for small children, in which the children look like the children being served by MIHOW.  Also, they’d like Spanish-language books appropriate for young children.

And, of course, there’s no money in MIHOW’s budget to buy such books.  But it doesn’t matter if they’re used, as long as they’re in okay shape.  So, dear interent, I’m asking you to help me think about who I might pester about such books.

For new books, I wonder about asking Ingram’s or maybe Scholastic.  But for used books, I know we have parents here.  What do you do with your books when your kids outgrow them?  I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have some kind of book drive.  I also wonder–there certainly are a lot of native Spanish speakers with some money teaching at local universities.  I wonder if they’d be willing to help specifically with the books for kids in Spanish.

Advise me, dear internet.  What do you think?