Women's Health Center

On friday November 26, 2010 Beck Community Development Foundation and the Center for Regional Development at the Autonomous Popular University of the state of Puebla (UPAEP) co-led a participatory workshop with community leaders in La Preciosita, Tlahuapan in order to

begin the planning process of the Women's Health Center. The workshop's main goal was to define the key objectives of the Center, define the services to be offered and outline governance structure. The workshop turned out to be a great success with enthusiastic participation of the community leaders.

The Women's Health Center has been a dream for many years since La Preciosita lacks access to health services in the community. Doña Natalia said "We have waited so long to make our dream come true. It is a real blessing to be able to participate in this meeting where we can design our dream center. Our families need health services in order to prosper and get ahead in life." Many of the women in the workshop described how they lost loved ones due to preventable illnesses and ailments left unattended due to lack of resources.

We started off the workshop identifying the main health problems facing the community. During a brainsstorming session, the participants came up with the following problems:

• Lack of adequate health infrastructure
• Lack of nutrition training
• People getting ill with preventable illnesses
• There is a lot of violence within families in the community
• The community is not organized and doesn't collaborate
• There is a higiene problem in the home and in the community
• There is a problem of food contamination from lack of higiene and from chemicals used in farming

After identifying numerous health problems, the workshop participants narrowed down two problems that are the most important to address: lack of adequate health infrastructure and lack of nutrition training. Then we put together a problem tree to identify root causes and consequences of these problems.

Then the participants defined the services that will be offered in the Women's Health Clinic. The Women's Health Clinic will have two main components: medical attention and education.

The medical attention will consist of primary physician as well as specialists such as dentists, gynecologists, opthamologist, among others. UPAEP,

Beck Foundation and the community will work together to ensure that medical services are consistent and of the highest quality. UPAEP is currently negotiating with the University's medical school to solicit their commitment to send interns on a regular basis.

The second component is education and training. The workshop participants defined the following topics as the most important to address in educational workshops:

• Nutrition
• Food preparation
• Organic farming
• Disease prevention
• Domestic violence
• Hygiene habits

We ended the workshop with a lot of enthusiasm from all of the participants who are eager to work hard to make the Women's Health Center. Don Raul, the president of the construction committee, said "I feel very inspired by the discussions today. I know that all of our hard work will pay off when we see our families get the proper attention and care they need."