Sanitation Celebration
Trip Start
Feb 24, 2007
1
4
14
Trip End
Mar 09, 2007
Theh Village - Shivpuri District - Madhya Prahesh,
India
Thursday, March 1, 2007
After discussing the changes with the community we divided into smaller groups and I spent some time with the Youth Group
Almost all the "Due South" team
. This is a group of 15 young (15-20 year old) men, who are all students, some are even studding at degree level. They represent all the castes and hamlets and promote the sanitation and hygiene messages through out the village through performance. Ajmar the leader explained that before WaterAid started work in the village their were no community groups and how through the different groups now in place the communication in the village has improved. We discussed how they use songs and plays to teach people about the importance of using latrines and good hygiene practice. The group also provides a pool of labour to help with maintaining the hand pumps and constructing latrines. They explained that each hand pump had a user group which contributed to the upkeep and maintenance of the pump. It was amazing to see the pride with which these young men described their duties and explained how the incidents of malaria and diarrhoea in the village have reduced.
The most telling bit of the discussion was the group explaining how before they liked going outside to open defecate because they thought that having a latrine inside your house was dirty. To then listen to the same group perform a song about a woman trying to persuade her husband to build her a latrine, and her list of reasons, just shows how far the community has come and how much of a change WaterAid have made in the village
Dan and Dan with the school children in Theh
. We left the group to give them time to prepare for the cultural performance, and went to visit the primary school (up to 14yrs). Again the school was so much nicer than yesterday, the children were all clean and wearing clean clothes. They took it in turns to perform lessons, songs and even a little in English for us. We returned the welcome, with our own performances of "Heads, shoulders, knees and toes" and a little later the "wheels on the bus". The teachers explained that the number of children attending school has doubled and over 80% now continue to the high school, which is great. We had our first brush with the hand washing song, "Har do, Har do" (more about that in later entries).
Finally it was time for the big cultural performance! The youth group performed a street play about a boy who gets ill from drinking water because his Dad is washing a cow at the hand pump. When the child doesn't get better he is taken firstly to a witch doctor (who charges 3 chickens and a bottle of wine) and finally to a real doctor for a scary injection! It was fantastic to see the group having so much fun, whilst the whole village watched on and learnt from them. Watching them laugh and make jokes about their previous poor hygiene practice, you begin to realise just how far this community has come
Our first Holi paint
! The big surprise came at the end of the play when the boy actually dies because his Mother (played by a young man in a lovely sari with nail varnish and lipstick!) doesn't listen to the doctor and gives him all the medicine at once, this really shocked me, but I guess the aim is to shock people to educate them. We ended our visit singing and dancing with the village and we decorated with Holi paint in a rather frantic celebration, which for us was a very welcome release of all the emotion of the last two days.
Later back at the hotel after debriefing and dinner we put on our own "cultural performance", Johnson seems to like "the wheels on the bus", but other than that the least said and remember the better (but i do have video footage of " I still call Australia home") :)
