Certified in hand washing

Last month I received an invitation to go to a two day conference put on by the Organization International for Migration and USAID in the neighboring town of Huaquillas titled ¨Lavado de manos con jabon y agua¨ (¨Wash your hands with soap and water¨). Now being that I have successfully passed the challenging one week puppettering course and the three day intense banana cook course, I figured what better certificate to pursue that hand washing. An art that I practiced all too well growing up… for those that knew me back during my well, clean freak obsessive days.
Upon registering for the conference I figured it would be somewhat ridiculous and didn’t really think I´d ever find myself teaching hand washing, it was just a way to bring one of the AREvista newspaper youth to a conference for a good professional experience and well, add another certificate to my wall.
Day one of the conference comes and the youth member and I set off for Huaquillas at 7 am as the conference starts at 8. I don’t know why I thought that a conference sponsored by two international organizations would start on time… we were there a good hour before the real start time and two hours before any of our fellow Arenillas coworkers started wondering in. Fashionably on time.
Although the idea of thousands of dollars in training people to become promoters of hand washing sounds ridiculous, after two days I was sold on the idea. After first I sat back thinking, now how is this part of the mission of USAID and the International Organization for Migration. I mean the logic was I guess that if people practice better hygiene and they can reduce infant mortality rates and the number of cases of diarrhea, people may feel better about their situations and stay in their country and not be enticed to immigrate to the US… but it is a far stretch, being that the reasons for immigration lie much deeper than hygiene and illnesses.
However, in those two days I did learn that the practice of washing your hands with soap and safe water could reduce the number of child deaths due to diarrhea by 40% and the number of respiratory infections by 25%. Also, over 90% of people in a study of this area have some type of soap in their house but only around 22% wash their hands with soap on a regular basis. Also, due to bad hygiene practices diarrhea is one of the top causes of deaths in children under 5 years old in Ecuador, therefore, teaching the simple art of washing your hands in running water and with soap is actually an easy way of trying to help this situation. At the conference we broke into groups and each group had to do a replica of a workshop in front of all 70 participants. My group had to teach the lesson ¨All poops are contaminants¨ … and now there are 6 Ecuadorians teachers in my group, but who gets chosen to present this information about poop being filled with bacteria to everyone?… the gringa of course. Yup, I had to get up there and keep a straight face and my Spanish going for a full 30 minutes as I held up pictures of poop and explained why after touching poop you should wash your hands with soap.
Now that I successfully passed the conference, I am considered a ¨social promoter¨ of hand washing here in municipality of arenillas. Our first mission after the conference was to plan a big open house event for international day of hand washing (yes, that’s a real international holiday, it´s celebrated on October 15th). The open house was a huge amount of work leading up to it, and a mountain of paperwork between letters, invitations, and reports, but it turned out great. I also spent a very intense work day cutting little water drops out of cardboard and gluing these to 300 pencils to give the youth a message to take home saying ¨always wash your hands.¨ This day happened to be Peace Corps 50th anniversary, so as I was sitting there on my fourth hour of cutting out these water drops all I could think is wow, if JFK saw me sitting here doing arts and crafts in a third world country wouldn’t he be proud. Around 150 kids came to the casa abierta and learned the importance of washing their hand and how to wash their hands correctly.
Then on the 17th I did a replica workshop with the AREvista youth member and 15 youth in her community. It was actually a lot of fun. We did skits about hand washing, each kid had to sing a song about when they should wash their hands, and we made little door hangers for them to bring home and put on their bathroom door.
I now have the full workshop kit in my house so I feel obligated to do some more of the replicas. Who knows what will come out of this. But it´s almost like getting to be a clean freak again for just an hour at a time at least.
So, for those that have not been to a hand washing conference, there are some principal things you should know:
1st the critical moments in which you should always wash your hands: after going to the bathroom, after playing outside, after taking out the garbage, after changing a baby’s diaper (a lot of people here actually believe that breastfeed babies don´t have contaminants in their poop), before eating, and after touching animals.
2nd if you wash your hands only with water you don’t kill bacteria, you have to use soap.
3rd if you don’t have a towel, you shouldn’t dry your hands on your dirty clothes you should air dry your hands.
4th all poops are contaminants
5th clean hands are happy hands, happy hands is good health.
6th the ROUTE OF CONTAMINATION… it goes poop->dirty hands-> mouth=diarrhea (via food or putting hands in your mouth)
So although at first teaching hand washing may seem like a ridiculous task, it is actually kind of an important issue here in Ecuador. Many times people say they are poor and therefore have bad hygiene. But really poverty does not have to mean dirty, washing your hands and taking of your hygiene is a basic step anyone in any financial situation can do, and doing this can prevent diarrhea and other illnesses. So one hand washed at a time we may be able to spread these messages.