Ophelia over in Mongolia has inspired me to post about how I spent Global Handwashing Day in Moldova! It is an important day for global health and its importance was driven home to me yet again this year. I partnered late this summer/early fall with another group through World Wise Schools. A girls K-2nd grade technology club were looking for a health volunteer in a Let Girls Learn country and I'm one of the Peace Corps Volunteers who answered the call. Through their adviser, we talked about Moldova. They then prepared from scratch a PowerPoint about the steps of effective hand-washing. I was excited to use this project for World Handwashing Day and for a much larger campaign next month promoting handwashing and other factors that prevent the spread of colds, flus, and other communicable diseases (mainly, not picking our noses, not touching our eyes, not putting fingers/objects in our mouths). For World Handwashing Day, my partner teacher and I selected our new-to-Health-Education class 9-A for an in-class activity: The would "help me translate" the PowerPoint so that it could be displayed in the school and used in future classes. The students generally translated it well. We did, however, hit a few bumps along the way. Resource Access A key issue I have to think about as a health educator is teaching processes that fit the resources in my community. There are some resources referenced in many "how to" lists on handwashing that aren't always found everywhere. A relatively recent survey of schools in Moldova conducted by UNICEF and the National Centre for Public Health found that 232 schools (15% of all schools) lacked adequate wash basins - meaning there was no place in the school adequate to even attempt washing hands. An additional 10% of schools in Moldova do have adequate wash basins, but don't offer soap. Fifty-two percent and 85% lack clean towels and hand dryers, respectively. My school is known for being a really nice school. One aspect of this is that we have indoor bathrooms (like 45% of schools in the country, though only 5% of rural schools). Each indoor bathroom has a two sinks with running water (heated in the winter) and soap dispensers. We also have wash basins outside of the school canteen, where students buy snacks during breaks between classes. Our school even provides toilet paper! Only one in four schools here does that (one in twenty for rural schools). Even with this, we don't have towels for drying hands, I've never seen any of the hand-dryers function, and we don't always have soap in the dispensers. In fact, we don't always have running water (we usually do, but the water or electricity going out is not a reason to cancel school). So, in our conversation using the slideshow below on handwashing, we had to talk through healthy alternatives for the steps we can't follow. Foundational Knowledge The second slide asks "When do we wash hands?" This is a key question that we Volunteers around the world actually measure & document, counting how many people we've taught that can successfully name at least 3 critical times for washing hands. Can you name these? I'll list them at the bottom of this post. Unfortunately, no students in class 9-A would have passed this question before our World Handwashing Day conversation. It took much prompting and hinting from my partner teacher and I to get any correct answers (most popular: when you wake up, before going to bed, after eating). In fact, at the start of last year less than 1/3 of the nearly 200 Health Education students could list three critical times for handwashing. In Moldova, there is a big health concern that people focus on and change their behavior for that can be difficult to understand as an outsider. A cross-breeze, or curent, is cited as the cause of a host of ailments. In my 17 months in Moldova, I have heard people attribute colds, flus, headaches, earaches, sore throats, pneumonia, pancreatitis, vascular disease, and cataracts to the cross-breeze. When we know the cause of a disease, we can take action to prevent it. Since many people *know* that a cross-breeze causes colds, they are attentive to making sure they're not in one. In buildings, they make sure only one window or a door is open (not both). They make sure that all windows are closed in moving transportation. Babies will have hats covering their ears year-round. Electric fans can be hard to find. Students and adults I interact with seem less convinced about microbes being the source of many diseases. Or, at least, I end up assuming so because I don't see preventative behaviors and students in Health Education aren't able to explain preventive behaviors for microbe-caused diseases. Frequent handwashing (particularly at critical times) is a key tool for preventing communicable diseases. But we have to believe it is actually an effective preventive tool in order to be compelled to make the effort. Above, you can see the display as it was hung in the school. The page on top explains where the presentation came from and what it was for. The pages are then hung with the hand-written Romanian versions directly above the English versions. After we translated the slides together, I sent them back to the girls' technology club in Romanian (shown below). Critical times for washing hands: Before (and during) preparing food, after using the bathroom, before eating, before feeding children, after taking care of a baby (particularly after changing diapers), after visiting sick people, after being in public places, after interacting with animals.
1 Comment
Ms. Damon
10/31/2016 02:56:19 pm
Hi Rebecca:
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Rebecca LehmanHealth Education volunteer serving at Boris Dînga Middle & High School in Criuleni, Moldova. Archives
May 2017
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