Hygiene and Sanitation Charlas

Charla=talk

Hygiene and santiation are code words for washing your hands at critical times, and using a latrine instead of defecating anywhere that is convenient. The CAWST manual includes the following statistics. If people just change to clean water, intestinal disease and diarrhea goes down 21%. If you just teach people to wash their hands, disease goes down 35%. If you just install latrines, disease goes down 37.5 %. The combined reduction is 93%.

So the key is not to simply provide clean water and latrines, but to get people to understand the chain of bacterial contamination. To be healthy people need to actually use the latrines, and get into the habit of washing their hands at 4 key times- after going to the bathroom, cleaning their infants, before cooking, and before eating. That applies up North too :-)

We try to incorporate more of the health talks and habit changing information in our community education sessions and return visits. In the last few weeks we have been dividing the filter talks. For example, Mauricio will do a short introduction, then Rolf will do a 30 minute health talk, followed by Mauricio going into detail about the filters. Essentially, when we introduce the filter concept to a village we are travelling salesmen.

Rolf uses interactive learning, with little lecture and lots of questions and involvement by the audience, to get them to think about their own village and their own habits. Earlier this week in La Palca we got spontaneous applause after the health talk from our audience of 81 households. What a rush.