LIMASAWA,
Southern Leyte, April 28 (PNA) -– Five years after receiving the country’s
highest nutrition award, this tiny island town sustained its nutrition program,
unmindful of any future recognition.
Mayor
Melchor Petracorta said they’re able to bring down the malnutrition rate to
less than one percent this year from 2.4 percent when they received the
Nutrition Honor Award (NHA) in 2011.
“Of the more
than 1,000 school children, only four are malnourished. We all know them and we
have been converging our efforts to save these children from under nutrition,”
Petracorta said.
The local
chief executive said that they have been exerting efforts to fight malnutrition
as they believe that this is the best strategy to ensure the brighter future of
children in their island town.
“If they are
well nourished, children will perform better in schools, protected from
sickness, and become productive citizens in the future, thus, addressing many
concerns that a local government normally encounters,” Petracorta told PNA.
According to
him, the sustained nutrition program can be attributed to innovative programs
in the locality such as vegetable gardening in all households, provision of
seeds and organic fertilizer, model garden maintained by local government
employees, deploying town officials to monitor status of children, and active
parents participation in arresting malnutrition.
“We have a
regular consultative meeting with parents of malnourished children. We taught
them how to take care of their children. We acknowledge their role in ending
malnutrition because government’s effort is just limited to implementation of
support system,” he added.
The official
said that government intervention in their areas starts during pregnancy by
monitoring the health status of pregnant women and providing vitamins.
“Now that we
have remarkably address nutrition-related concerns, we are moving to achieve
universal education. We even converted our waiting sheds into alternative
learning centers,” Petracorta said.
Limasawa
received the Green Banner Award in 2006 and managed to improve their
performance in the past years paving the way to be considered the Consistent
Regional Outstanding Winner in Nutrition (CROWN) before receiving the NHA in
2011.
The island
of Limasawa was the site of the First Mass in the Philippines when Portuguese
world explorer Ferdinand Magellan ended in the beautiful island looking for
spices.
On Easter
Sunday of March 31, 1521, Magellan ordered the expedition’s chaplain Fray Pedro
de Valderrama to say the mass.
PGL/SARWELL Q. MENIANO
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