The founder of Triple Responders Intiative, a non governmental organization, Chief (Mrs) Abiola Amore, nee Akinyemi, has the passion of preventing avoidable deaths. She has the passion of training Nigerians on ways to administer first aid on victims of cardiac arrest through training and the use of manikins by preforming cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR). In this interview with Our man, Abiodun Taiwo, She gave an insight into her project and the importance of the programme. Excerpts
What do you do at Triple Responders Intiative?
What we do in TRI is we save lives using CPR, CardioPulmonary Resuscitation by using manikin on how to save lives. We decided to go into this line because as an individual, I love humanity, and I believe knowledge is power. I started falling in love with this line, right from my secondary school days, because I am one of the Red Cross member, an officer of Red Cross when I was at NUD, Isabo, Abeokuta. I started going to inter- house sports where we rendered services to students. I love humanity, so now that I am okay, I went into it because I see that nowadays we don't have inter- house sports, but yet, people die unnecessarily, there are some things we can do to help people survive. Especially when they collapse, there is no sign of life and as research have found out that a healthy brain can function without oxygen for four minutes and unfortunately because of situation of things, it do take ten minutes or more before help arrives. And we can do something for that person by saving his life by giving him oxygen so that the person is not permanently disabled and that is what we teach and what we do.
Collaboration with other Stakeholders:
I am from Ogun State, and through that we get to know the right people that we think we can train, we introduce ourselves, and when we send a letter to them, they respond and we pick it up from there. We go to schools, churches, mosques, community centers, health care centers and everywhere just to teach people how to save lives. So we don't really have a boundary, we intend to go to all the 36 States of the Federation, but because of the situation, we decided to stay within the West for now, but we plan to go further in future.
The response from the people
The response has been very tremendous, you know it's an NGO, we don't ask people to pay to work with us, we train our people and they are volunteers. You have to volunteer your self and time, And if they are interested, we train and teach you what to do, and when you get to the field, we also assist you. People have been coming along, some Youth Corps members, we don't just do the teaching alone we also do some basic life teachings like teaching them how to make money. You know there is no white collar jobs anywhere, so we teach them how to make money. We have trained people on how to make soap, toilet soaps, relaxers, beads, how to weave wigs using their hands and how to anchor events like Master of Ceremony, making shoes, bags and small chops for parties, how to make drinks and all so on. So we have a group of people that we work with like a team that teaches these skills.
Most of our students, some of them are still in School, so when they come for classes, they take it back to school, some of them start learning and start selling the stuffs to others and before you know it they have gone everywhere, so it's all about empowerment.
How do you monitor those that were trained
We do a sort of follow-up, we visit some of these communities to see how things are going. We have one of Our students that are into souvenir making, and I have a friend that had a function this past Saturday and it's one of our students that made part of the stuffs she shared as souvenirs and people loved it. So we followed up with them to ensure that they are doing what we taught them to do and they made us proud. We are really impress with them.
Support from people
Honestly it's just few of us like, I have my husband who has been a very strong pillar of support, some of his friends and colleagues. We do task ourselves. Out of mine salaries as well, I set aside an amount every month. And that's the fund we use to sponsor ourselves. We just don't only teach, but we also feed them, you know if you want people to pay attention, when they are hungry, they may not listen, so we feed them, give them some snacks or even meals. Apart from the meals, we even give them raw foods, like rice, vegetable oil and food seasonings, so when they get home, they can quickly get something for the kids to eat. Because if they have spent four five, Six hours listening to us without the palliative, they may not listen well. So is just a group of us doing these. No sponsor from the State, or the Federal. But all of it has been coming from few of us that believe in us and are encouraging us to keep the vision going.
Apart from Finance, what are the other challenges are you facing
Apart from financial challenges, the attendance at various centers of our programmes always go beyond what we planned for. For such a situation, we tried to improvised because we don't want to turn anybody back, so we just have to accommodate them, by putting them in various departments they want to learn like we do have programmes. We have areas for Adire, for small chops, for make up and so many. We give them opportunities for them to decide areas they want to go like haircut and others, to cater for these people have always been challenging, but it's doable.
You are dealing mainly with how to save lives, do you visit disaster areas?
We don't go to such areas because we are not Red Cross, but we train how to help rescucitate lives. We stay in a conscious area. We go to areas where people can assimilate what we are teaching. We don't normally use English language alone, because we know people can have problem in the language of communication, so we make use of vernacular and adopt little English. We put them on off and after the whole training, we set up the maniquine which they use to practice what they have been taught and what they have seen so far. When they do that, they have successfully completed that part, we give certificate of participation, they have something to take home showing what they have learnt and what they have got. So we do that as a form of motivation.
Efforts to get support from government based on the scope of the project
Yes we need government support, we are ready to work with any agency, either government, individual or organisation. We are more than happy to welcome them. Let me tell you most of those supporting us, their wives have also participated in the training on how to save lives. I have a very unfortunate situation when a friend lost her husband. They were having conversation on the phones, suddenly, he slumped, she is a nurse, but there was no way she could have got to where the husband was at that point in time, and nobody could understand what she was saying on the phone. If someone was there that knows how to effectively do CPR, he would have been saved. And that man would have been alive till date.
The plan for the future
We are planning to take the message and the training to all parts of the country. We want everyone to learn how to save lives. Everything is not about government, all about doctors, sometimes help takes a while, if we know how to effectively perform this act, you can save lots of lives, we don't need to start panicking, we don't do it at all with CPR because if there is fear, we may be doing more damages to the situation. So we need to tell community members to come out and take the advantage of the training, you never know when you will need to practice the training, when you effectively administer it on the people, they will refer to you as a savior. Saving lives is what we all need to do, we are to support one another, if we see somebody that just slumps on the street and just walk away, that we be heartless, but if come together and work together, learning this we are going to save a lot of people from dieing. It cost us nothing but the time.
Are you fulfilled with the outcome so far?
I won't say I am satisfied so far, but we give all thanks to God. We can't stop now because we still have a longer ways to go. So many people need this training. Like we need to visit government schools, we can not all afford private schools where they teach some of this things, so we still have to go a long way. We started about five years ago, and we don't pray to stop the good works till we are sure everyone has the knowledge of the training. Like I said, it's a process. A training that we all should have. For the fact that it's free, I don't think we have anything stopping us from having the training.
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