Who’s responsibility is it to alleviate malnutrition in Bolivia?
It’s a slightly complicated question. It’s not the volunteer’s responsibility. Nutritional deficiencies are not problems that can be fixed immediately, they are the type of problem that require significant time and attention both during and after treatment, both from a nutritionist perspective but also from a psychological and sociological one. A band of nutritionists alone cannot fix this epidemic, it takes legislation and a conscious social shift to create a change.
That is to say, it’s the Government’s responsibility to expand its existing programs for battling malnutrition and expanding it’s programs to reach not just the children who make it to the hospitals but also them in their homes and in their families where the malnutrition takes place. It starts with making a cultural shift to change the norm for women to start having children at ages 15 and 16 to ages where they will at least have a mothering instinct for their children once their born. It starts with creating a society with the mentality that it takes a village to raise a child, a social net in which children are taken care of not only by their mothers but by everyone in their social circle.
However, these are only scrambled thoughts that grew from my experience here. Even in speculation, I cannot help but to be hesitant in saying them because everything is more complicated on the inside and often feel naïve giving solutions when I only understand the situation from the outside.