“In March 2020, everything around us suddenly stopped moving. We stopped working, stopped going out to meet with loved ones,” explains Kanton Kruthum, a 28-year-old mother of four, “With schools closed for more than 18 months because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are constantly anxious about the next day… The last thing you want to experience in this space and time is a child falling ill.”

When her four-year-old son complained of an itchy throat, Kanton says she was scared he had contracted COVID. She immediately phoned her CHW Doreen. “She examined the boy and ruled out COVID. She instead gave him a child-friendly antibiotic and he recovered in a few days. Doreen has done an incredible job spreading information on how people in our community can protect themselves from contracting COVID. People listen to her.”

Kanton says she is grateful for the free and quality essential medicines that she’s been able to access through Doreen since the onset of the pandemic. But one of the biggest challenges is that CHWs have faced some stock-outs and supply chain issues during the pandemic. “In those cases, we resort to buying anything we can find, and sometimes the children don’t take the correct dosage.”