Education is the Key

I mentioned in an earlier post that usually in the afternoons, around 5 p.m., Vidal would pick up Mery and me, and we would head out to small communities, like the community of San Antonio pictured here and do educational sessions and plan meetings for future projects. The district of Santiago has 46 small communities; I only ever worked in 10 of them. The way the afternoon would work is that we would arrive at the community and go to the point person or leader in the community and ask if the people remember there is a meeting—since the meetings were usually a week apart, people frequently forgot. Then we would go door to door, knocking to remind people there is a meeting about subject X in the local. We would tell them we would be starting in 5 minutes. Once we had around 5-10 people gathered, we would start with the educational session. The meetings were around 30-50 minutes long, and we would have information and activities about proper hand washing, how to build household landfills, proper household trash management (there is no trash collection service in these communities), how to maintain bathrooms and latrines, safe methods for treating water in the home through adding bleach, boiling or using solar disinfection methods (water is not treated at the source in these communities), and water conservation techniques (not only are they living in one of the driest deserts in the world, but they are also only receiving water for only an hour two times a week). Most of the time, women and their children represented the majority of the attendees. During my first year, I would complete about one educational session in three different communities each week (three educational sessions a week). The educational sessions were fun and challenging to put together—I tried to always use some type of fun activity paired with helpful and memorable information and tips. Education is key, so that’s what we do the majority of the time.