Great Salt Bay School Community nurse Christa Booth sits in her office in the Damariscotta on Thursday, Dec. 5. In October, Booth went a medical mission trip in Tanzania where she worked primarily in a health center in the village of Ipalamwa to address stunting, an issue in which children under develop due to lack of nutrients. (Johnathan Riley photo)
In October, Great Salt Bay Community School nurse Christa Booth embarked on a medical mission trip to the African country of Tanzania. When she returned, she brought home a few photographs, many memories, and a refreshed perspective.
Through a program with ConvenientMD Urgent Care, New England’s largest urgent care provider, Booth spent 14 days with 12 medical professionals educating people in the nation’s mountainous central region and making medical home visits.
“I think everybody can benefit from the perspective that you get from going on a trip like this,” she said. “(The impact) was huge.”
Booth, of Bristol, said she always wanted to be a medical professional.
“It was either that or becoming a veterinarian,” she said. “I was always trying to mend others.”
Booth, a registered nurse, attended St. Joseph’s nursing school in Standish and graduated with a four-year degree in nursing sciences.
When Booth’s husband, Joseph Booth, returned from his fourth deployment in the military, it spurred Booth to go do something as “a human adult, not as a parent” because she had been alone with her kids for awhile, she said. She also decided she wanted to do something that would allow her to give back to a community.
“I love community health, I mean I work in a school, it’s a big thing for me,” she said.
On Oct. 10, Booth flew to Tanzania, a nation known for the plains of Serengeti National Park and for Mount Kilimanjaro, the continent’s highest mountain.
She landed in coastal city of Dar es Salaam and then flew domestically to the nation’s central capital, Dodoma. From there, Booth and the other volunteers drove to Iringa, a city sitting on a cliff overlooking the Great Ruaha River valley in the Southern Highlands region.
From Iringa, she drove two and a half hours south into the mountains where Booth spent most of her time in the villages of Makungu, Lulindi, and Ipalamwa, where the health clinic was located.
“I went over primarily to work in the health clinic and to do home visits in the area,” she said.
At the clinic, most of her work centered on taking children’s measurements and working to combat stunting, when children under develop due to lack of nutrients.
Stunting is a problem of increasing prevalence in developing nations, including Tanzania.
Booth said 42% of the children in the Iringa district aren’t getting the nutrition they need in the first one to five years of life and “their growth halts as a result.”
“So these kiddos have all kinds of problems that result from that, both the fact that they don’t grow to the potential size that they could be but also … it impacts the brain development,” she said. “When you don’t have nutrition, they don’t have access to protein, they don’t have the access to all the things that you know we can just go to the grocery store to grab.”
Great Salt Bay Community School nurse Christa Booth (left) sits with a pregnant woman in a village south of Iringa, Tanzania in October. Booth went on a medical mission trip where she made many home visits and focused on health education. (Photo courtesy Christa Booth)
Aside from stunting related issues, at the clinic Booth did vaccinations and lab testing for HIV, malaria, E. coli, and intestinal worms.
During home visits, Booth educated people in nutrition, dental hygiene, healthy pregnancy, developmental milestones for toddlers and infants, birth control, and more.
“It was very day-to-day spending on what we were doing, but they parceled us out, and we were visiting people in the homes, doing education, checking on the resources they needed, making sure they were doing the thing that they needed to do to keep them and the kids healthy,” she said.
One of those health conscious protocols was boiling water from the river to make sure it’s potable. Booth said all the water in the river system is contaminated from animal fecal material. To be consumed safely, it needs to be boiled.
“You can’t use it if it’s not being boiled because you will get sick,” she said.
However, ash gets into the water during the boiling process and villagers often don’t like the taste, even if the water is cleaner.
“That’s kind of a barrier to them boiling it, because they prefer the taste of it when it’s just fresh from the river,” Booth said.
Traveling to an area of the world where the access to basic needs like running water aren’t a given, put Booth’s life in America in perspective.
“We just have so much that we don’t even think about, like I said, running water, hot water, our showers our stoves, our ease of being able to go get food – all of those things are things we don’t even think about but are huge,” she said.
Booth said her favorite part of the trip was being able to interact with the families and children of the places she worked in and being able to experience the gratitude she felt from the people she worked with made the trip special.
“The best part of the whole trip was being in the villages, meeting with the families, doing education with them and the sense of gratitude and joy that they had despite the fact they didn’t have a lot,” she said.
One mother was so thankful for Booth taking time to do a home visit with her and her family that she tried to give Booth locally grown avocados, despite food supply scarcity in the region.
“She had just spent the past half hour discussing the fact that she was having issues with food supply and her ability to feed her family,” Booth said. “It’s just mind blowing to me that they’re just so thankful and joyful.”
A woman walks with a broom outside of a line of brick homes in a village in the central mountain region of Tanzania in October. Christa Booth, of Bristol, visited the country on a medical mission trip with ConvenientMD Urgent Care to help with medical education in the area. (Photo courtesy Christa Booth)
