If you are wondering what it means to be a WatSan-er, you would be in the same shoes I was in 39 months ago. I had no idea what the Water and Sanitation Program would involve in Peru. Many of the objectives of WatSan are portrayed in this poster that I brought to various educational sessions. Basically, we are trying to break the routes of contamination from the source (feces) to intake (drinking water and/or food). The ways we work to block the routes are through promoting hand washing, proper trash management and sanitary practices to avoid flies, introducing appropriate technologies to avoid open field defecation and by treating water, either at the source or in the home; this means our work includes conducting various educational sessions in communities and schools (using visual aids like this and creating games to teach the concept), facilitating construction of various types of economical bathrooms, promoting hand washing, training water service committees and solid waste service committees, and monitoring families’ hygiene practices. I did a few of those activities/projects, plus a few other projects for my first two years, and now I support current Volunteers to carry out these types of activities and projects.
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