Junior Freddy Laux spent from Dec. 26 through Jan. 9 in Mpunde, Uganda working with the Empower Through Health organization, which works to prevent the spread of schistosomiasis and to help solve issues of energy use. While Mpunde itself has relatively good access to healthcare, the surrounding area is in desperate need of the aid provided by Empower Through Health and their volunteers. 

One facet of the organization’s efforts in these villages is to improve their use of energy, particularly to increase efficiency in cooking.

“What was really interesting was the clean energy and cookstoves surveys I was doing,” said Laux. “We were asking people about their cooking habits, and it was actually really astonishing to hear that a lot of people spent their entire day cooking because the way that they cooked was so inefficient.”

The standard cooking practice in Uganda is the use of a three-stone cookstove, which is largely inefficient due to the loss of energy to its surroundings rather than to the food that is being cooked.

“And also it's sad because it's so inefficient and takes a lot more fuel,” explained Laux. “And so you'll see some mothers who say that they spend six hours on one meal and you’ll also see mothers who say that they have to spend days upon days collecting wood fuel in the brush, which is really dangerous for them and it’s very time consuming.”

The shortage of energy and time-consuming practice inevitably reduces the amount of food available, specifically for the mother.

“Sometimes actually, you'll see the mother skimping herself short, which is really tragic,” said Laux. “A lot of the time these mothers have so many kids, one after the other, that they're constantly breastfeeding. And so that's another way in which the kid becomes under-nourished and malnourished, and the mother won't have enough nutrition for herself to produce breast milk or properly nurse the baby.”

Empower Through Health works to help solve these energy and nutritional problems. Laux and his fellow volunteers distributed Vitamin A for nutritional improvement and more efficient tools for cooking.

“At the end of this survey, you could offer them to buy the rocket stove for a very small investment, and then they'd actually get paid to upkeep it because it is energy efficient,” explained Laux. “And so it was really good to see a lot of these people who spent so many hours on cooking, being able to afford the rocket stove, which obviously would be a huge investment for them because they could spend so much more time doing other things to build their income and better care for their kids.”

The other major problem facing the people of Uganda is the schistosomiasis epidemic. Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease that infects mostly children, causing irreparable damage to internal organs and anemia.

“It's really interesting when you go to these societies, you see the biggest cause of death in a lot of places is HIV AIDS, or malaria,” said Laux. “When you come back here, if one patient came into the doctor's office with malaria or HIV AIDS, we have therapies that would be able to keep them alive. Just realizing that these people don't die because these diseases are not preventable, but they're dying because of a lack of access to treatment is crazy.”

Laux and his fellow volunteers distributed Albendazole as a dewormer to treat schistosomiasis.

“I think the biggest thing that I got to see was just how many of the issues relating to these cultures are treatable diseases that are just so prevalent in some of these countries near the equator or the global south,” said Laux. “It was just really eye opening to see that a lot of the diseases here that we have that are very treatable and that our modern medicine has pretty much figured out how to solve these problems.”