Rajiv Kafle

Nepal

I went to a TB conference last year and they talked about the rewards they give patients for taking their drugs, and the high tech bottles that beep and have LCDs in the top that tell when you opened it. Isn’t it better for people to understand why they are taking their drugs instead of giving them rewards for taking the drugs?

We have come out with ten booklets and several fact sheets. We were influenced by the early TAC posters. In our next set of posters we will have people representing the messages in the posters. We use a lot of materials from TAC. We used other sources like i-Base to make our training manual and treatment literacy books. We wanted to share our materials with our Indian friends as well and we translated the materials into Hindi so they will get inspired to make treatment materials.

After producing five books, our volunteers have learned so much. It is really empowering for them. We talk about every detail down to the kind of paper we use.

We had to work with the language. A lot of the i-Base concepts were specific to the UK and we had to change those. Many of the brand name drugs mentioned are not available to us, so we use the generic names. There are possible double meanings and difficult grammatical points. Someone translated the meaning of “prevention during labour” in the booklet as “preventing HIV while at work.”