Summer 2024

At a recent meeting with our 24 volunteer Community Promoters, who were trained as part of our Water and Sanitation Program, I encouraged them to get back to their roots. In the past few years, they have expended lots of time and energy helping us with our Earthquake Relief Program, supervising the distribution of materials for families to rebuild houses damaged in the earthquake of August 2021. But now, with all the materials distributed and the program basically completed, we’d like them to become more active in community education regarding hygiene and sanitation and periodically inspect the latrines that we helped build as part of the Water and Sanitation Program. We were basically speaking to the choir, as they expressed enthusiasm for community education and said they appreciated their role in helping people live healthier lives by preventing illness. We gave them new “activity sheets” where they record all their educational activities each month and forms for them to use as they inspect family latrines (looking to see if they’re being well maintained, used properly, cleaned appropriately, etc.). But, we also spent some time brainstorming about future expansion of the program.

We’re planning to train another 12 volunteer Community Promoters from 6 new communities this fall, with assistance from faculty and students from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. They’ll be helping us evaluate data from a survey we’re going to conduct in communities with and without Promoters in order to see if our educational activities are actually changing knowledge and behaviors. And, they’ll also help us finalize our Training Curriculum, including didactic information to be taught, demonstrations, games and testing. We realize that we can’t train and support Promoters in every community. But, every community wants the education we provide and they especially want the latrines we are helping to build! So, as a result of our brainstorming, we decided that the Promoters will begin to extend their educational activities into communities that are immediately adjacent to their own community. We’ll meet with the leaders of those communities to obtain approval for our plans and then begin to teach the people about water, hygiene and sanitation. Then, in a year or so, when the education is completed, we’ll help them build latrines! It’s a way of expanding our program without having to train too many Promoters and will keep our present Promoters engaged and enthusiastic.