Provide Nutritional Supplements to 30 Orphans

Nutrition support helps the children living with HIV to cope with the side effects of the anti retroviral treatment the children are taking for their physical health. The health is further affected, if their daily diet does not include essential nutrients causing poor physical growth and other infections. This is specially seen in families affected by HIV and economically disadvantaged and under the care of grandparents and widow headed households.

Buds of Christ supports the inclusion of better nutrients in their diet for families under the care of widow families and grand parents household by educating the care takers on nutrition, providing health mix and special nutrition for deserving children. The micro-project of Global giving helped Buds of Christ to support 35 children living with HIV for three months.

The various programs implemented were; 

Creating awareness among the care takers on nutrition and for children:

In the widow mother’s group meeting and support group meeting for children, nutritional awareness was created especially on the low cost nutrients to be included in the daily diet. The session also included in taking about the traditional recipes and the nutrients from it. This helped the grand mothers and widow mothers to plan healthy diet within their budget. About 25 mothers and grandmothers were benefitted from the programme.

Support group meetings:

Monthly support group meetings are organized in Tiruchengode and Salem government hospitals. In both these meetings, 35 Children were provided with multi grain health mix, dates and high protein mix snack diet. This was given for three months through the project.

Home visits:

Home visits were made once in a month to children who were immunity compromised and special nutrition support were also provided to help them come back to normalcy.

Successful case study – Nutrition support

Kalaivanan (14 years ) and Priya (11 years) (name changed) are orphan children living with HIV. They are under the care of their grandparents whose main source of income is doing coolie work and does not bring in a regular income. This has affected the nutritional health of Kalaivanan and Priya, who are under weight and less than the normal height. In addition both have been affected by skin infections too. Karthik who is already on the anti-retro viral treatment is not regular and thus affecting his immunity. This family has been closely worked with monthly nutrition support by providing special nutrient package of rice, dhal, cereals, vegetables and eggs in addition to the health mix packets.

Over the last three months, there has been improvement in their health indicated by Kalaivanan and Priya’s increase in their weight.

There are many children who are in need of nutrition support and we thank donors at Global Giving for giving us support for the last three months to provide the nutritional supplements for children affected by the chronic disease.