Awareness Raising



The SWASH club that was set up in the Primary School

We planned and gave 4 awareness raising sessions – 2 in the Secondary school and 2 in the Primary school. They revolved around the importance of washing your hands and preventing the spread of diseases. We taught them a song that we had made (actions included) about when to wash your hands, which we continued to hear the children sing up until the day we left.

 

 

 
We tried to raise awareness in fun ways! My favourite was when glitter was involved. We (the volunteers) had a handful of glitter and we stood in a huge circle with the children in between us to play a game. The aim of the game was to go round the circle, counting from one to ten, or moja to kumi in our case. As you said a number you brought your right hand over to your left side to clap the next person’s hand. When you reached kumi you had to clap the next person’s hand before they moved it away. Whoever won stayed in the game and the other person went into the middle. The glitter spread onto the children’s hands which led to the comparison with the spreading of germs. Therefore, it is important to wash your hands to prevent the spreading of germs and consequently diseases.

1) moja  2) mbili  3) tatu  4) nne  5) tano  6) sita  7) saba  8) nane  9) tisa  10) kumi



Drawing the 5 F's on the blackboard

Alongside this, we also taught them about the 5 F’s – Food, Fingers, Fields, Fluid and Flies – which explain in more detail about how bacteria is spread. In a non-scientific explanation, if one of the 5 F’s (eg. Food) is contaminated and unclean, then it leads to the possibility of the person who has been into contact with it contracting a disease.

 

Hopefully, the things that we taught them will prevent them from getting diseases in their future!

Our Primary Project – School Latrines

Our Primary Project was SWASH which stands for School, Water and Sanitation Hygiene. We worked with a partner organisation, a Tanzanian NGO called MAMADO, who had received funding from Water Aid. Our role was to assist the community in building school latrines as well as raising awareness around hand hygiene.

We measured out the holes and marked them out with danger tape before beginning to dig down. We didn’t get a great deal of help from the community, apart from 3 men who were being paid. The concept of volunteering was relatively new in the village.

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, things were different when we began making the bricks. As well as 5 men, who were being paid, working with us, a lot of community members also came to volunteer with us. We made the bricks by mixing sand, cement and water, and then using a mould. In total we made 2400 bricks (by hand) which were slowly but surely being moved to the school when we left.

Making 1 of the 2400 bricks

A villager pouring water onto the sand and
cement, ready to be mixed

We had to water the bricks twice a day for a week, to stop the bricks from cracking

Some of the bricks were transported by cows 

Unfortunately we didn’t get to start building the latrines (nor did any of the other Charlie groups) as an engineer never arrived!

But the building of the latrines wasn’t necessary the most important part of the project. As part of SWASH, we also had to give awareness raising sessions to the school children and teachers, which I’ll tell you more about next time.

MAMADO had a 2nd project in Chipanga - putting in water pipes. We helped dig the trenches in our first week. The ground was incredibly hard so we had to use pick axes before shovelling out the rocks/dirt.









I'm Home

I returned to the UK on Monday morning after an amazing 10 weeks in Tanzania and have since spent the week recovering. In the coming weeks I am going to be updating my blog on what we did, as well as uploading some photos.

Walking home with some of the Primary School children