To celebrate this worldwide day of sanitation appreciation, I held a "programme" for the students at the primary school in my village. It was nothing short of a beautiful disaster. The day started out with such promise - a fellow Serere volunteer had come over in the morning to help me out a bit, and we spent the day preparing. On the schedule was a quick lesson plan that centered on how germs spread and how it is necessary to wash with soap to clean them off. To illustrate this point I decided to utilize glitter. So my style. Then we had a quick song that I translated from French into Serere that went to the tune of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," followed by a relay race of sorts. And to wrap the day up I was going to have all of the kids take a hand washing pledge by stamping their hand print on a big banner. At least that's what was supposed to happen.
The event was scheduled to begin at 3pm, so around 2:30 we headed over to round up my counterparts and the health worker in my village. And as we walk outside a cold, blustery wind practically knocks us over. A sure sign of rain. Sure enough the downpour came moments later. This was totally unexpected as it hadn't rained for weeks, weeks! But Senegal decided on a quick shower at the precise moment of my event. Fine. We had some tasty village popcorn and waited it out.
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| visual aids |
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| germs! |
When the clouds cleared out we jumped into action. Luckily for me, all the kids returned to the school, still eager to participate, and my health worker hadn't been scared off by the rain. But the clouds overhead looked ominous, so I decided that we had to get this party on the road and pronto. The health worker an myself launched into the lesson plan, using glitter as the germs and demonstrating the proper way to wash your hands with soap. Then we had a few kids come up to demonstrate, which was great because you just can't get this glitter off your hands without the soap. After that, we rushed into the relay race. For this I had the kids get into three lines, and the first kid got a heaping handful of glitter and were told to pass it along via "greeting" each other - the act of greeting has immense cultural importance here in Senegal and I wanted to give them a medium through which they could understand the transfer of germs. Plus the kids love glitter. Once they all had their hands covered with "germs" they had to rush to the front of the line and wash all the glitter off of their hands using the proper techniques, and then raced back to the next one. It was a close one, but we declared everyone a "winner" since we can all wash our hands with soap now! Worked like a charm.
At this point things had been moving pretty smoothly, but the rain clouds were rolling in again, and I was getting nervous. I decided that I had to skip on the song - it was mildly devastating, as I was quite proud of my Serere translation. So we moved rapidly on to the handwashing pledge. This was where is all began to fall apart.
We brought out the paint for the handprints and the kids went berserk. It was like instantly being pulled into a mosh pit as they rushed up the steps to the school. There were hands everywhere as we tried to slather them with paint, when of course the rain picked up again. Now I've got about 30-40 kids on my hands, rushing to paint their hands as well as get inside the classroom to avoid the rain. This became just a crazy flurry of rushing around, elbowing, painting, hand stamping, and general chaos. It was stressful, to say the least, but we got through it. In the end I think I taught some kids how to wash their hands with soap and how to play with glitter. Pretty good day if you ask me.
loving the colorful tea kettles :)
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