Tippy Tappy's

It’s been 7 weeks since I left the comfortableness of camping in Tanzania. It’s fair to say that it’s been rather different being back home, especially now that I’ve moved to the North (Durham) for university.

One of the Tippy Tappy's we built around the
community to promote hand washing

In my room at Durham I have a sink which is worlds away from the hand washing facilities available in Chipanga and many other rural communities in Tanzania. There was little or no hand washing facilities in Chipanga, and definitely no plumbing.

A community member testing out her new
Tippy Tappy for the first time

Not washing your hands after going to the toilet and before cooking leads to serious consequences, such as diarrhoea, which are not so easily treatable out there as in the Western world. To begin tackling this problem, using instructions provided by Raleigh, we began building Tippy Tappy’s. This is a really simple hand washing facility made out of 2 Y-shaped sticks, a long stick, an empty oil container, some string and a short stick, some stones for drainage and some soap on a rope.

We built a Tippy Tappy at our camp which the
children tested out for us

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The schoolchildren lined up to wash
their hands

We built Tippy Tappy’s for people who owned businesses. It only took about an hour and has real potential to prevent the spread of diseases. We also built 2 Tippy Tappy’s at the Primary and Secondary school, one outside the boys’ latrines and the other outside the girls’ latrines. As part of one of our Awareness Raising sessions, we held a competition where the schoolchildren were split into groups and had to come up with a song that lasted 30 seconds which they could sing whilst washing their hands. We taught the children how to build them and encouraged them to build them at home. It was really amazing to see Tippy Tappy’s popping up around the community and it felt that we had started a long lasting change in the community.

 

 

 



I entered this photo into the ICS Photo Competition
and came 2nd place in the Health Category