Wash Your Hands!

As mentioned in a previous post, one of the biggest things we focus on as WatSan Volunteers is promoting hand washing at the critical moments. During my first year of service, on e of my main projects was carrying out hand washing workshops in the schools. I started the workshop in the all-girls secondary school and developed a six-week curriculum using the components of the Behavior Change Framework. This Framework theorizes there are 10 key barriers that stop a person from adopting a specific behavior; the key to getting people to adopt the behavior is to work around all the components. My goal was to work through the key components during this workshop. For around two months, I worked with 15 classes a week focusing on various parts of hand washing: why we should wash our hands, how we should, the illnesses we can get if we don’t wash our hands, simple cost-effective solutions for hand washing if a family cannot afford a sink, etc. In this picture, the girls are examining the giant hand that has tiny highlighter marks on it; the marks are not visible from their seats, but they are visible up close—just like germs are not visible to the eye, but up close with a microscope they are. I loved working in the schools. I then modified the workshop to work in the primary school. The primary school included singing songs about hand washing and drawing lots of pictures. Working with youth was my favorite group of people with whom I worked. They always brought so much energy and excitement to whatever topic we were discussing. And to be honest, walking into the primary school was a mood booster—within a couple minutes of walking in the gates, kids would be surrounding me to hug me. How could I not feel better after that?