About HIAM-Health

Hamutuk Ita Ajuda Malu: "Together we help each other"

The vision of HIAM-Health is to empower East Timorese people to work together to reduce high infant and maternal mortality rates and to reduce unacceptable health and social conditions. We also aim to help decrease the emotional and financial burden on impoverished families caring for sick relatives, through advocacy and financial support. Our education programs are aimed at teaching awareness of good health and well-being through improved nutrition, hygiene and sanitation practice. We also understand and cherish the need for spirituality during times of vulnerability, and continue to support the sick, despondent, neglected and dying with encouragement and prayer.

"Proper nutrition is a powerful good: people who are well-fed are generally healthy. Healthy adults can lead more fulfilling lives; healthy children learn more in school and out. Good nutrition benefits families, their communities and the world as a whole.
"Malnutrition is by the same logic, devastating. It plays a part in more than half of all child deaths worldwide. It perpetuates poverty. Malnutrition blunts the intellect and saps the productivity of everyone it touches." (UNICEF)(HQ98-0933 March 2005)

Childhood malnutrition is a critical problem in East Timor, and a common cause of infant deaths. Current statistics put the population of children in East Timor under five years of age at 177,684, of which 42.6% are underweight and 46.7% severely stunted (UNICEF, East Timor 2005). According to the figures, at least twelve out of every hundred of these children will die before the age of five, most of them within the first two years. [A comparison with Australia helps put that into perspective - fewer than that number of children per thousand die in Australia!]

Most of these deaths are the result of malnutrition in some form: bad water (which leads to gastric-related deaths) and poor diet (which increases vulnerability to mortality through a wide range of other diseases, such as tuberculosis, Dengue fever and malaria). Children with malnutrition die from the complications of malnutrition, such as infection, severe diarrhea, dehydration and severe metabolic disturbances. Even in children who survive such complications, malnutrition can result in irreversible blindness (from associated vitamin A deficiency), severe developmental delay and permanent stunting (growth failure).

HIAM-Health serves as an important and unique link between the Dili National Hospital and sub-district medical clinics in the management of babies and children with malnutrition. HIAM-Health provides a continuum of care for malnourished children who have recently been discharged from in-patient care, or for children referred at the mild to moderately malnourished stage, thereby preventing them from entering the severe stage of malnutrition which require hospitalization.

The service HIAM-Health provides is holistic, with care focusing on the entire family, and an emphasis on prevention as well as management of malnutrition through its educational workshop program.

In order to improve the care and rehabilitation of children suffering from malnutrition HIAM-Health is planning to establish a separate and dedicated Malnutrition Rehabilitation Centre.