Kenyan Teen Merceline Achieng Learns about Health from WiRED International
BY ALLISON KOZICHAROW AND BERNICE BORN
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erceline Achieng is a teenage girl who lives in Kisumu, Kenya, and attends St. Theresa’s Girls Secondary School. She recently joined the Kisumu Urban Apostolate Programme in Pandipieri, where she studies training modules at WiRED’s Health Learning Center. While she has focused her study on HIV/AIDS, she has access to more than 350 other health topics available without cost to all members of the community.
Since Merceline started WiRED’s health training, she has learned about the characteristics of various diseases, how they are spread, how they are treated and how to avoid them. She urges her peers to come to the center, where they can all study together on the computer and take the quiz at the end of each module.
Merceline said, “There is free teaching at the center. We teens can come together and find ourselves at home.”
Educating herself about health has enabled Merceline to face other challenges in her life, such as dealing with difficult schoolwork, being attracted to the wrong friends or hearing people tell her she can’t do something. She said, “You must have a dream to have a purpose to live in this world. You must make sacrifices when the going gets tough to persevere in the name of your dream.”
WiRED believes that Merceline’s story offers yet more proof that people in impoverished and medically underserved areas of the world are eager to learn and spend time studying to improve their own health and the health of their entire community. WiRED’s abiding goal is to provide health training to as many people in a community as possible, thus strengthening that community’s preparation for and response to health challenges.
Merceline said, “I would like to thank WiRED for this program which helped me study so many diseases I didn’t know about that affect our lives. So my fellow teenagers, I urge you to join this program because it will change your life.”
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