If you are working at the clinic and weighing the babies, it doesn’t take much too notice: there are a lot of underweight children around here. This isn’t necessarily a problem – some children are just small. Yet we discovered that this was a symptom of another problem: malnutrition. It appears to be a complex problem for women to give their children a balanced diet. 
We have often seen women continuing breastfeeding for very long and ‘forgetting’ to supplement this with solid foods from 6 months on. This slowly builds up into malnutrition. This is really a pity, because often the mothers are unaware. We realised that personal advice and attention goes a long way to prevent and cure this type of malnutrition. There are many nutritious local foodstuffs available to combat malnutrition, as long as they are taken in the right proportions (particularly green leaves, fruit and soya beans!).All in all this is certainly an issue Project Share is going to give high priority, since malnutrition is also the underlying cause of many other illnesses, such as malaria, diarrhoea and generally weak resistence to diseases. [Suglo]