Meet Nurse Herrerias
When Michelle Herrerias, RN traveled with the Peace Corps to Madagascar in 2013, she conceived of a rather unique approach for how to address the nutritional concerns of the country. She wrote a cookbook. “About fifty percent of the people are malnourished, not because of food choice, but because they don’t eat a diversified diet,” Herrerias said. She went on to explain that while the local health workers were trained in how to confront malnutrition, they did not have a comprehensive resource to educate their communities.
Inspiration for the project also arose from Herrerias’ own passion for cooking. “I really enjoy experimenting and am always looking up and trying new recipes,” she expressed. While the cookbook certainly provided an opportunity for novel ideas and creativity, Herrerias wanted to be certain hers wasn’t the only cultural or culinary perspective.
To ensure this, Herrerias sent out surveys to over one-hundred community health workers in the region to gather information on measurements such as how much a typical family is able to spend on food in a week, what kinds of foods are accessible, as well as what’s grown seasonally. “I sent out the surveys because the people there are experts on their region.” Herrerias conveyed. “They could tell me what’s available, what they like to eat, what’s realistic.”
Rice is the staple of the Malagasy diet. Herrerias explained how the Malagasy population eats rice for every meal and for the majority of the meal. “Mostly what we were doing was working on coming up with different side dishes because some people would eat greens and only greens.” Herrerias related. Many of the different components for side dishes she offered would add more color to the meal: potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, tomatoes. Herrerias herself is an enthusiast of polychromatic cooking. “I like to cook the rainbow by incorporating lots of fresh veggies to add flavor and color to my meals,” she shared.
Besides the artistic appeal, adding color variety would help guarantee Malagasy communities were getting a wide range of nutrients. Herrerias hoped the cookbook would teach the families how to be “a little bit creative, using local ingredients, but to also show them how to pair foods together, for more complex proteins, and what’s important for child health, getting them different macro and micronutrients.”
Herrerias credits the success in compiling the cookbook to not only the communities and surveys, but also the health workers. “They were huge in being able to write something that would actually be effective,” she expressed. In fact, the overwhelming majority of contributors to the cookbook were from Madagascar. “They were all local partnerships,” Herrerias conveyed. “I was based with a U.S organization, but I was the only actual foreigner working on the project.”
As much as the cookbook was an educational resource, Herrerias guaranteed that the exchange of knowledge was bi-directional. Another exchange of knowledge during the project was Herrerias learned and practiced Malagasy. This then allowed her to volunteer as a translator for an Operation Smile mission since “the number of people who speak both Malagasy and English are in short supply.”
Herrerias’ emphasis on collaboration and mutual education during her time in Madagascar matches her perspective on Global Health outreach: “We can’t impose our ideas or our agenda on someone else,” she shared. “It’s really important to collaborate and form partnerships, and meet [people] in a way that’s acceptable to their community and acceptable to them.”
With this philosophy, Michelle Herrerias will guarantee every one of her succeeding projects is community inspired and driven, no matter where she travels.