Friday 29 May 2015

Would you eat your own Poo?

Squatting in front of a classroom, demonstrating what consuming your own faeces might look like, it's hard to know if you're at a high or low point in your career – probably a bit of both.

While the nursery school and clinic have been progressing, Paul has been busy with a couple more water projects. With the well finished and providing plenty of water on a daily basis, we decided to tackle a couple of other issues that would help keep the water flowing at Buhangija.

The centre has two large rainwater harvesting tanks but, like the well, they’re broken. One has a cracked, damaged roof and the other has no cover at all. The roofs and gutters feeding the tanks are dirty and damaged. The open tank is full of green, stagnant, rubbish filled water – completely unfit to be used for cleaning, let alone drinking. Yet every day, children, particularly the small ones, fill bottles with brown / green water, seemingly oblivious to the fact that water isn’t supposed to be that colour.  Seeing a child wrap a corner of their t-shirt around the neck of their bottle in an attempt to ‘filter out’ the bigger pieces of dirt has become a common sight.
 
So we found some local technicians, went shopping for materials and started the work of fixing the tanks. As well as putting on a nice new roof, we cleaned the existing catchment areas and gutters and added a new stretch of guttering to get as much water as possible. Rainwater harvesting is a good solution to provide water during the dry season in Tanzania. Rainfall levels are quite high during the wet season so being able to collect that means you have a supply of water the whole year round. To see more pictures of the tanks construction, click here.

We have also fixed showers, added hand washing taps and cleaned toilets. However, we realised early on that we could do as much as we wanted with the ‘infrastructure’ but unless it was coupled with some education and training, it may not bring any benefit to the health and well being of the kids. Hence Paul’s attempt to explain to a group of children that not washing your hands with soap is like eating your own poo. Thankfully, they saw the funny side and shouted ‘hapana’ (no) when the key question was put to them. Expounding the health benefits of hygiene doesn’t work, especially where children are concerned, but disgust and some healthy peer pressure has been proven to make an impact. So hopefully watching the ‘mzungu’ pretend to do something so revolting might just stick with them the next time they use the toilet or go to eat food!
 
As the children are prone to forget, we have told the matrons that every child should wash their hand before meals and so, one evening last week, we stood in shock and a hint of pride as we watched 80 children sent to the sinks before receiving food. We’re hoping this will continue.

Swahili word of the day: Kosha Mikono kwa Sabuni (Wash your Hands with Soap – now on signs above sinks and hand washing stations)

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