diarrhea.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer I have become pretty open talking about my bodily functions. Although, those of you who know me, I actually have never been particularly sensitive to talking about things others would consider taboo. Maybe its because “snot” was a regular topic of conversation at the dinner table when I was a kid. Its easy to blame things like this on my parents.

Either way, Peace Corps volunteers share their poop stories pretty regularly. Last week, a group of us was together and an American expat joined our table. At first I was a little embarassed for him. He had to just sit there and listen to class young women like myself talk about that time they had to run off the chapa for the bushes with the who chapa watching them suffer. We each have stories like this, and we each try to outdo each other. I say with some confidence, that I am not the star of the best poop story I have heard among volunteers, and since it isn't my story, it remains untold until she, the guilty pooper, is ready to share such a story.

We joke about pooping. We joke about it because to us its this pretty obnoxious bodily function that comes and goes. To us, its not something that we are concerned about. Its not something that can take our lives.

But to Mozambicans, it is.

Last week, two of my babies from the nutrition center passed away after a week of bad diarrhea.

Vaselina was on her way out of the center. The doctors had finally said she had reached a healthy enough weight to go home. She had been with us at the center for four months and I had watched as her cheeks got plumper and plumper and the concern on her mom's face went away.

Rosa had only arrived at the center two weeks before. She was the smallest 20 month old baby I have ever seen. Her mother spoke no Portuguese and we worked hard with her about her personal hygiene and the basic nutrition for a baby living with HIV. She was not gaining weight as she was not eating and her mother wasn't insistent. Feeding a baby who throws a fit each time you get a spoon near her mouth is pretty discouraging, especially for a young, sick mother who lacks energy otherwise.

Since all of the kids in the nutrition center stay with their moms, hygiene is both extremely important and extremely difficult. Once we had a little girl with scabies who had we had to really watch to make sure her mother was washing her and her clothes regularly and not sharing with the other kids in the center.

As far as we can tell, Rosa came down with diarrhea first, and it quickly spread to the other kids in the center. The moms all cook together and the kids all play together, so you can imagine diarrheal disease has the potential to spread quickly. Despite the fact that we had explained the importance of hand washing and bathing to the moms, these kids got sick. And it didn't help that both Vaselina and Rosa were so small and struggling to begin with.

But that is usually how it is with diarrheal disease. Its a nasty, sad way to die, but it targets sick people whose immune systems are not as strong as ours. It, bacteria that causes diarrhea, looks for people within whom it can thrive because otherwise we pass it after a couple of days.

After Vaselina and Rosa passed away, we decided to make hygiene a weekly theme at the nutrition center. This week I played the part of a fly in a role-play. I explained how much I loved sitting on poop and then sitting on food and on people's skin. It made people laugh-talking about poop usually does. But I think they also got the point. I saw one of the moms wave off the flies that afternoon. Its small actions like this that have the potential to prevent deaths from diarrheal disease. More than waving off flies though, we did a hand washing demonstration and showed how to set up a “tippy tap,” a hands-free hand washing station made using local materials. I am not sure if the mothers will go home and continue these types of hygiene practices, but I can hope they will.

In the meantime, I am pretty sure I will continue to talk about poop. We all do it. But we all should be able to do it without it causing our mothers to really worry.