Womens Empowerment Health Workshops

Objectives:
For July

Strengthen local community relationships with CIWEC clinic in Pokhara and within the
community
Offer our Womens Empowerment groups opportunities to learn about important
womens health issues
Increase confidence and support for women to learn and ask questions about different
health topics

Summary:
This month our Womens Empowerment projects have had a big health focus. With the help of our
partners at CIWEC, our local clinic in Pokhara we had the opportunity to organize womens health
workshops for our Pame and Male Patan projects. Continuing with the theme our womens English
classes have included learning vocabulary for the different parts of the body as well as learning how to
communicate illnesses and health problems. Supporting and encouraging these women to learn about
their bodies and to know how to look after themselves is one of the main ways GVI Nepal can make an
impact in the community.

Report:
On the week of the 6th July we held womens health workshops at our Womens Empowerment projects
in Pame and Male Patan. Our partners at CIWEC fantastically volunteered to help us, sending out a local
doctor and nurse to deliver the women a lesson in Nepali. Its something we had been discussing for
some time so to finally see our plan in action was very rewarding.
Health topics covered:

Contraception
Menstruation
Hygiene
Preventative health i.e. pap smears
Reproduction

Our womens empowerment group from Pame

with physicians from CIWEC

The turnout was great. As this was the first workshop of this type we werent sure how many women
would come but slowly they emerged and we ended up with a full classroom of 20+ women at Pame
and even more at Male Patan. We had women of ages some even bringing their children along to take
advantage of the workshop.
It was interesting to see the contrast between the two workshops. The women at Male Patan are much
more exposed to womens health being more centrally located. They were happily engaging in
discussion with the physicians asking about the varieties in contraception etc. The women in Pame
however took a little long to warm up to the discussion. For most of these women it was the first time
they had openly talked about many of the topics and were learning a lot of information for the first time.
Being somewhat more remote and isolated from Pokhara means a lot of these women rarely make trips
to the doctor for checks ups. Its reasons like this that made the workshop so important to present and
hopefully it has exposed these women to their options and will encourage conversation about their
health and maybe some more trips to see the doctor.
After the workshops we treated the women to lunch and gave them some time to ask the doctors more
questions one on one.
We are hoping to run some more workshops very soon and introducing new health topics to the
women.

The women from our Male Patan projects with staff member Binita Gurung, Bronwen Maher, Lok
BDR Gurung and Ruth Malthouse

We continued the health focus in our English lessons giving the women the opportunity to learn the human
vocabulary. They thought that the word belly button was absolutely hilarious so thats one body part they
will not forget the word too. They have also been learning about different health problems and how to
communicate these health problems with I have and I feel sentences. So now when they miss an English lesson
for being sick they can let us know why as well!