Kicking off Screenings: Basic Screening in Himachal Pradesh (Post #13)

Hi! Welcome back to the blog! This week, we have a bit of a unique topic. We're going to be talking about some recent work Spiramen has done in underpriveleged communities.

In the first post, around December, I introduced you all to Spiramen Foundation, our mission, and our execution plan. To recap, Spiramen is a non-profit organization where we are focused on increasing cancer survival rates in the underpriveled community. Where I live, a big cause of deaths in this demographic is oral and throat cancer (usually caused by smoking, chewing tobacco, and alcohol). So, we decided to focus on these two cancers through our work. A big issue we identified in these communities is that people are not even realizing they have cancer until very late stages. They don't have the resources to go to hospitals when they're unwell and get diagnoses. For this reason, Spiramen is aimed at providing free screenings in underprivileged communities, including basic screening (height, weight, blood pressure) and cancer-specific screening (Toluidine blue, physical check for lumps).

We did our first screening a few weeks ago, when we had a school trip to Himachal Pradesh. Here, we undertook service activities like volunteering in a government school. At this school, we were given the opportunity to choose what we wanted to do to help these children. Since me and a few members of the Spiramen team were present, we decided to do basic health screenings. With the help of a local doctor, we checked the height, weight, blood pressure, and eyesight of more than half of the school population. Since we didn't have an actual vision chart with us, we made one on the spot. While it wasn't entirely accurate, we tried to make it as accurate as possible. These children were aged from 5 (kindergarten) to 11 (fifth grade).

We found that being underweight was a predominant issue in these children. As part of combatting this, our team also arranged a lunch-time meal for the kids on one of our service days. While one day certainly isn't enough, it was nice to see their satisfaction at having a hearty meal.

I learned a lot throughout this service camp, and Spiramen was able to start its screening journey! Here are some pictures of the school and screening initiative below: (the children's faces have been blacked out for privacy reasons)

Thanks for reading this week's post! See you next Friday at 6pm!