Ready, set, stickers!

     I have never seen such excitement for something so simple as a smiley face sticker as when Krishna and I began handing them out after our first hand washing workshop! After their Saturday Seventh Day Adventist service, we decided to host impromptu hand washing and oral rehydration therapy workshops because of the unexpected number of people that attended the service. Krishna and I took the lead on the hand washing, while Rianna and Syed took the oral rehydration therapy. 

Our first audience for a hand washing workshop.

        When we started the workshop, we had a mere 20-30 children, and by the end we had a packed classroom of around 60 children. We started by having some volunteers come up to demonstrate their current hand washing habits, using GloGerm to show their resulting cleanliness. The GloGerm works by highlighting the remaining germs after the children wash their hands.  We had them rub the gel into their hands, wash their hands and examine the remaining “germs” with a UV light. The kids were fascinated by the fancy technology and enthralled with examining remaining germs on their classmates’ hands.  Most importantly, they witnessed a common pattern, with the children missing between their fingers and their wrists. Completely winging it at this point, Krishna and I decided to demonstrate the way that we wanted the children to wash their hands, using a cup of clean water poured over our hands before and after scrubbing our hands with soap, making sure to clean palms, wrists, fingernails, between the fingers and the backs of hands. After our demonstration, we sang some songs that changed words from “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to enforce some of the ideas about hand washing. It was these songs that really captured the attention of the children, they truly seemed to love learning and singing along with us! Once we finished, Krishna and I had the bright idea to have all the children come up to us to get a sticker to thank them for sitting through our presentation, but it resulted in total anarchy. We had gigantic crowds of hands extending toward us, shoving the smaller children out of the way and some coming back for two and three stickers! While it was complete chaos, it was still so much fun to watch the children interact and get to engage with so many at one time, this was our first experience in Sierra Leone with this many children! 

(From left to right) Syed, Hannah, Krishna and Rianna teaching proper hand washing technique.

We learned a lot about how to structure our workshops from this experience and we ended up teaching the rest of the hand washing workshops the same way and a few days later we were able to spend around a half hour in each of the classrooms in the school to teach! Going through the rooms, the children welcomed us so warmly. Throughout our whole time in Sierra Leone, we would hear them singing our songs and some of the younger ones, whom we had a harder time communicating with, would show us how to wash our hands out in the play yard. Working with the children was an experience I will not soon forget.  I hope the children remember how to wash their hands and teach their friends how to wash theirs with as much warmth as we felt during our workshops!