Hello Esteemed Readers!
Happy Holidays in arrears to everyone who celebrated the
Easter Holidays. It’s been a restful and long weekend here in Nigeria thanks to
the Easter holidays which ended just yesterday (Easter Monday).
So, I am currently rounding up the course, “Neglected Tropical
Diseases”. One thing I have enjoyed about the course so far is the engaging
discussions between all course participants. I guess that because the previous
course didn’t provide that opportunity for open discussions with colleagues, I
had somewhat missed the discussion board and was happy to have it back. The discussions
board has a way of stimulating your thoughts and opens you up to more learning
than you would have had with just the basic lecture materials. Besides, sharing
ideas and having (safe) arguments with your colleagues exposes you to different
thoughts and experiences. And this gets better if you have a very diverse class
like mine with students from almost every continent. As the course is rounding
up and we are all required to submit our written assessments, I can presume that
we are all currently neck-deep in finalizing our essays. This is one of those
essays where you to choose a position (for or against) on a topic and you are required
to defend your chosen stance with evidence-based critical thinking and
justifiable reasons. . It seems to be much more work than I initially thought
and I hope it works out just fine!
So in my previous post, I mentioned that I had some great
news coming up. Well, here it is!!! (**drum-rolls**)
During the summer school (I know I never really did finish the summer school series, pardon me)…
I was inspired to start up a virtual platform that would be a go-to resource
place to educate the general public on relevant animal-human health topics in a
simplified, interesting and engaging manner. As a veterinarian, I understand that
in my country, there is so much ambiguity and ignorance on the aspect of animal
health, animal welfare and zoonoses. This has led to abuse and quackery on so
many levels, under-appreciation of quality and professional animal health care
and on a larger scale, transmission of zoonoses. Undertaking this project had always
been on my mind but I was inspired to take action on it when I had some related
discussions with my some of my colleagues. I discussed my idea with Yusuf (my
Nigerian colleague) and of course, things got fashioned out from there.
Well, after about 5 months of planning, challenges and maybe a little bit of procrastination, I finally launched the MyAnimal,MyHealth Network. This website is a virtual
educational and public engagement platform that will provide information,
learning and news on various clinical and public health issues and solutions to
animal and human health in Nigeria. My amazing team and I decided to focus on Nigeria
until we are sure we have the capacity to expand to other sub-Saharan
countries.
The site launched officially on March 1 with accompanying
social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter. It’s great to know that the
network is growing and currently has a followership of over a thousand people
on Facebook. I am happy with the engagement so far as we constantly receive some
messages of encouragement and lots of messages on inquiry or questions based on
our various topics of discussion. Of course, in establishing this momentum and
order, we will continue to work on improving our structure and content for
better effectiveness.
So, just in case you are interested or you would like to
support this initiative (which I would appreciate so much) you can visit the
website (www.myanimalmyhealth.org)
and subscribe to our posts. Better still, you can like our page on Facebook (MyAnimal,MyHealth) or simply follow us on Twitter @manimalmhealth.
Lest I forget, a fun part of starting up MyAnimal,MyHealth Network was
having the opportunity to learn about building a website from scratch, all thanks
to know-it-all Google. Due to a major disappointment from a professional who
was supposed to build the site (one of the “challenges” I encountered), I pushed myself to
learn something new and totally unfamiliar – building a website. It took me a lot of errors, consumed time and internet data (Oh yeah... Internet is quite expensive here) but I’m so
glad I did!
I am grateful and look forward to greater things with this.
So, off to continue with my written assessment and then myanimalmyhealth.org!
A plus tard … Ciao!
