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{
    "id": 943831,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/943831/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 40,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 210,
        "legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
        "slug": "moses-wetangula"
    },
    "content": "given treated nets and not told how to use them. So, the nets are now the fishing gear, instead of being used for the purpose it was intended. During our time, we did not have treated nets, but the Bora Afya officers told us how to avoid mosquitoes. We were told that in the evening, we were to get dry cow dung and burn it on the cooking stove. That was enough to drive out mosquitoes from your house and you would sleep soundly. Today, we are told that someone has won a multibillion tender to supply nets. You are given a net, but since you sleep on the floor, the mosquito can still bite you through the net and so on. Knowledge and application of it is what is important and is required for purposes of preventative approach to diseases. We also have basic things like our eating habits, which is still part of our serious problems with health. You go to villages, and because of lack of advice, somebody goes to sell five eggs to buy bread. There is no way you can compare eggs with bread. However, they will go and sell five eggs that have got high nutritional value to buy bread because bread is very foreign. This is the kind of advice that we need and counties will do a lot better if: (1) They assess their manpower needs. You will find that there are people who retired as nurses and health providers, but they are still running private clinics in the local marketplace at the age of 70 or 80 years and they are treating more people than even the public health facilities. (2) The people who assist the population in the villages, for example, midwives, most of them are quite comfortable earning Kshs3,000 or Kshs4,000 a month and they will take care of expectant mothers in the whole village. Any lady who is about to deliver does not have to struggle on her own because these midwives will go and help. We need these midwives to be properly harnessed and be appreciated with some token payment. They do not have to earn a big salary with PAYE and so on because we know that income tax only starts at a certain bracket. If you are paying people Kshs3,000 or Kshs4,000 as an appreciation to use their skills in the villages to prevent mortality at birth among women, it will help a great deal. Equally important, those young people who are graduating from MTCs, we need a marshal plan in counties where even when they are waiting for formal employment, they can still be taken on as interns earning little stipends to help them move from point ‘A’ to ‘B’ so that they can help the population. There are so many innovative ways of preventing diseases, but what is lacking is the will to do it. I hope that at the passage of this Motion and its communication to the counties - it is something that they already know or ought to know - things will change for the better."
}