Educating Sikh women on personal health

NST: IPOH: Coffee powder and toothpaste to heal your child’s scraped knee?
Apparently these are some of the traditional "cures" used by Sikh women to treat minor injuries at home.
The Sikh Women’s Awareness Network (Swan) is hoping such practices would be a thing of the past by providing women with the proper knowledge.
"My mother used Colgate on my cuts when I was growing up," said Harbans Kaur, who is one of Swan’s 11 founding members.
The 45-year-old executive secretary also expressed her concern over the apparent use of coffee powder as a salve for injuries, adding that this would only infect the wound.
It is misconceptions such as these that Swan seeks to overcome as they embark on a mission to empower Sikh women.
With the motto "a healthy family is a happy family", Swan hopes to increase the women’s awareness of personal health and equip them with skills to earn money from their homes.
"We are just laying the foundation," said Harbans, noting that some women from Klang, Petaling Jaya, Malacca and Johor Baru who attended Swan’s awareness programmes were forming groups for yoga exercises and walks around their neighbourhood soon after the sessions.
Swan held a health and empowerment programme in Buntong yesterday and discovered that some 300 women who attended it had never had a health screening before.
"They are busy caring for their children, their husbands and their in-laws, that they aren’t caring for themselves," Harbans said.
By bringing the health screening services to their neighbourhood, Swan hopes to teach women that they should be healthy themselves to enable them to keep their families happy and healthy.
Swan had organised similar programmes in Taiping and Johor Baru, but yesterday’s programme offered the most comprehensive health screening, including bone density checks, pap smear, dental checks, eye and ear checks and breast cancer screening.
"This programme is very good. My aunt doesn’t usually go for a health check," said one of the women at the screening, Amarjit Kaur, 53, after learning that her aunt Puran Kaur, 83, had poor bone density.
National Population and Family Development Board, the Perak health department and the Kinta dental services department also lent support to the event.