Cliché Alert: This blog entry contains pictures of cute, smiling African children. Eye-rollers and cynics, be advised.
I’m happy to report that, in spite of my last post, I’ve actually managed to accomplish a tiny bit of that elusive thing called Development Practice this summer. Moreover, I’ve figured out how to compress pictures, so even my painfully slow internet connection won’t stop me from showing you what it looks like!
I was brought on to design a school-based hygiene outreach program, a project that lies at the crossing of the education, health, and water sectors (an integrated approach! Jeff Sachs would be so proud.) So, naturally, it’s totally neglected: the water guys build the latrines and the health workers treat diarrhea, but few are taking responsibility to connect the dots in between. In other words, you can build all the toilets you want, but how do you get people to use them?
This might seem obvious at first glance. But there are plenty of examples of things that we know we should do but don’t, even when they are cheap and readily available. Raise your hand if all your light bulbs are high-efficiency fluorescent. If you floss daily. If you eat 3-5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. If you raised your hand for all of these, you’re a better man than I.
In any case, behavior change is a tricky beast. But fortunately, I’ve got a good model to follow: UNICEF's WASH in Schools is a worldwide movement to engage kids in good hygiene and create healthy school environments, through everything from pop songs to mural contests to Global Handwashing Day (October 15th – don’t miss it!) This program is based on the premise that kids learn and adopt behaviors much more readily than adults, who are already ingrained in their habits. It also takes a step further, suggesting that kids can actually be agents of change in their own families (who hasn’t heard of kids getting their parents to start recycling or to quit smoking?) and in their communities.
Sounds easy, right? All I had to do was get a bunch of kids to learn a few catchy songs and diarrhea rates would surely plummet. And Step 1 was done before I got here: MVP’s Water and Sanitation team has already built improved pit latrines and hand washing stations at all seventeen primary schools in the cluster. Enter the “Mambo! Safi!’’ Club: a five-week miniseries of WASH games, skits, songs, and activities to get kids at three primary schools thinking about hygiene in their environment. (“Mambo!’’ “Safi!’’ is Swahili slang meaning, “What’s up?’’ “All clean!’’ Ah! I slay me.) For the last three weeks, two MVP facilitators/superheroes, five very patient primary school teachers, 40-odd kids and I have been testing this thing out.
A few lessons learned so far: first, the infrastructure picture isn’t as rosy as I assumed. The hand washing stations look marvellous, really, until you peek inside and find that they are always empty (even though kids carry buckets of water to school every day). And you can forget about soap, which the teachers tell me is simply unaffordable. The well-engineered cement drainage basin might as well be a sculpture on the school grounds. The latrines are sturdy but dirty, and all I can say is you’d better be packing your own TP.
Second, the kids actually know loads about hygiene already. They brainstormed more critical hand washing times than I could think of, and they knew the names of tons of diarrheal diseases and their transmission paths. They rattled off germ-blocking strategies like sanitation pros: protect boreholes, use a toilet, cover food, boil water. They also tell me that they wash their hands at home, just not at school. To me, that means we’ve got more than hygiene education to do around here.
I’m convinced that just as kids are more inclined to adapt new habits, they are less inclined to accept the status quo. While an adult might say “Soap’s not in the budget,’’ a kid will ask, “Why?’’ (or, even better, “So what?’’) In other words, we can take this a step further: instead of just trying to get kids to wash their hands, we’re trying to get them pissed off when they can’t.
That’s a little tricky, because Tanzanians don’t get pissed off easily. The kids I’m working with are respectful, obedient, peaceful, and often frustratingly shy (a far cry from the sassy, noisy Dominican kids of my teaching past). But they're also very diligent and great at working in teams. It’s hard to picture them storming the Ministry of Education to demand soap, but I think there’s a fighting chance of them eventually pooling laundry soap stubs or appointing a captain to make sure the hand washing buckets get filled. All it takes is a little bit encouragement, and that encouragement is going to need to continue after I leave Tabora in three short weeks. So I’m putting my hope in a lot of different baskets – the MVP team, the primary school teachers, and the kids – to carry this thing forward. I'm also leaving behind a whole stack of Mambo! Safi! Kits - everything a teacher would need to conduct the five-week program at their own school.
Today, we’re launching an interschool poster contest on hand washing and diarrheal disease prevention: winner’s poster gets photocopied and hung at every school and clinic in the cluster. Plan for sustainability: lamination. Hey, it’s a start :)
I’m happy to report that, in spite of my last post, I’ve actually managed to accomplish a tiny bit of that elusive thing called Development Practice this summer. Moreover, I’ve figured out how to compress pictures, so even my painfully slow internet connection won’t stop me from showing you what it looks like!
I was brought on to design a school-based hygiene outreach program, a project that lies at the crossing of the education, health, and water sectors (an integrated approach! Jeff Sachs would be so proud.) So, naturally, it’s totally neglected: the water guys build the latrines and the health workers treat diarrhea, but few are taking responsibility to connect the dots in between. In other words, you can build all the toilets you want, but how do you get people to use them?
This might seem obvious at first glance. But there are plenty of examples of things that we know we should do but don’t, even when they are cheap and readily available. Raise your hand if all your light bulbs are high-efficiency fluorescent. If you floss daily. If you eat 3-5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. If you raised your hand for all of these, you’re a better man than I.
In any case, behavior change is a tricky beast. But fortunately, I’ve got a good model to follow: UNICEF's WASH in Schools is a worldwide movement to engage kids in good hygiene and create healthy school environments, through everything from pop songs to mural contests to Global Handwashing Day (October 15th – don’t miss it!) This program is based on the premise that kids learn and adopt behaviors much more readily than adults, who are already ingrained in their habits. It also takes a step further, suggesting that kids can actually be agents of change in their own families (who hasn’t heard of kids getting their parents to start recycling or to quit smoking?) and in their communities.
Sounds easy, right? All I had to do was get a bunch of kids to learn a few catchy songs and diarrhea rates would surely plummet. And Step 1 was done before I got here: MVP’s Water and Sanitation team has already built improved pit latrines and hand washing stations at all seventeen primary schools in the cluster. Enter the “Mambo! Safi!’’ Club: a five-week miniseries of WASH games, skits, songs, and activities to get kids at three primary schools thinking about hygiene in their environment. (“Mambo!’’ “Safi!’’ is Swahili slang meaning, “What’s up?’’ “All clean!’’ Ah! I slay me.) For the last three weeks, two MVP facilitators/superheroes, five very patient primary school teachers, 40-odd kids and I have been testing this thing out.
A few lessons learned so far: first, the infrastructure picture isn’t as rosy as I assumed. The hand washing stations look marvellous, really, until you peek inside and find that they are always empty (even though kids carry buckets of water to school every day). And you can forget about soap, which the teachers tell me is simply unaffordable. The well-engineered cement drainage basin might as well be a sculpture on the school grounds. The latrines are sturdy but dirty, and all I can say is you’d better be packing your own TP.
Second, the kids actually know loads about hygiene already. They brainstormed more critical hand washing times than I could think of, and they knew the names of tons of diarrheal diseases and their transmission paths. They rattled off germ-blocking strategies like sanitation pros: protect boreholes, use a toilet, cover food, boil water. They also tell me that they wash their hands at home, just not at school. To me, that means we’ve got more than hygiene education to do around here.
I’m convinced that just as kids are more inclined to adapt new habits, they are less inclined to accept the status quo. While an adult might say “Soap’s not in the budget,’’ a kid will ask, “Why?’’ (or, even better, “So what?’’) In other words, we can take this a step further: instead of just trying to get kids to wash their hands, we’re trying to get them pissed off when they can’t.
That’s a little tricky, because Tanzanians don’t get pissed off easily. The kids I’m working with are respectful, obedient, peaceful, and often frustratingly shy (a far cry from the sassy, noisy Dominican kids of my teaching past). But they're also very diligent and great at working in teams. It’s hard to picture them storming the Ministry of Education to demand soap, but I think there’s a fighting chance of them eventually pooling laundry soap stubs or appointing a captain to make sure the hand washing buckets get filled. All it takes is a little bit encouragement, and that encouragement is going to need to continue after I leave Tabora in three short weeks. So I’m putting my hope in a lot of different baskets – the MVP team, the primary school teachers, and the kids – to carry this thing forward. I'm also leaving behind a whole stack of Mambo! Safi! Kits - everything a teacher would need to conduct the five-week program at their own school.
Today, we’re launching an interschool poster contest on hand washing and diarrheal disease prevention: winner’s poster gets photocopied and hung at every school and clinic in the cluster. Plan for sustainability: lamination. Hey, it’s a start :)
Week 1: the kids conduct an experiment to see which hand washing method will get their hands the cleanest: a towel, a bucket of still water, running water, or running water and soap. These kids' hands are coated with cooking oil and tea leaves to represent germs.
Week 2: Germ mapping! The kids drew a map of their school, illustrating all the places that germs might be hiding.
Presenting the maps! (I'm a little bit in love with this kid - he's the youngest, tiniest, and most eager and precocious of the whole bunch.)
Next, the kids played Germ Police and set out to the latrines to conduct a hygiene survey: how many are there? Do they all have doors? What's on the floor? Is there water and soap for hand washing?
Investigating at Ilolangulu Primary School 
Yep, doesn't smell so hot in there.
Dutifully filling out the surveys
Finishing up back in the classroom...
...and then deciding on the most important hygiene problems facing our school. On Week 5, we'll be voting on one or more of these to take on as a club.
Working with the primary school teachers is both an opportunity and a challenge - they are the ones with the power to keep the sessions going, but the tough part is getting them to believe that the kids (or the teachers) can make a difference!
Week 3: Mapping the journey of a germ from poop to mouth, through flies, fingers, floors and fluids. It's worthy noting here that the Swahili word for germs is "wadudu.'' This keeps me endlessly entertained, though I think I'm the only one who gets the joke...
Hours of low-bandwith picture downloading paid off - the kids were fascinated by the microscope photos of diarrhea-causing germs. After learning about the different categories, we played a fun memory/matching game.
This is the best post any MDP has written ever! You rock Laurita! I am so impressed by your work and I feel extremely motivated.
ReplyDeleteI might have to agree with Stephane on this one. (Sorry other MDPs, but who doesn't like a little friendly competition?)
ReplyDeleteGreat Job Laura! I was very happy to read about this, wish I could've been there with you.
ReplyDeleteReally enjoyed reading this post! Keep them coming. Best, Lucia (MDP Secretariat)
ReplyDeleteWow Laura, we have the same job it seems! Behavior change, the disconnect between knowledge and practice, monitoring and evaluation...looking forward to the day when we can sit down and talk about all this! Cute kids, by the way.
ReplyDelete--Douglas McRae