100 day ceremony

Progress. Tangible progress. The children at Knar School are finally getting cleaner and, more importantly, they are doing it by themselves now.

A while ago I read an article about a personal hygiene project in an Indonesian village. It was a six months model. I thought that seemed ridiculous; that it couldn't possibly take that long. Now I completely understand that it is a reasonable time frame.

If you live in a village where almost no one has soap in their house, access to clean water is almost non-existent and you might not even have your own well then good personal hygiene is difficult to achieve, if not impossible. Add to that the lack of education, the struggle trying to get enough to eat every day and the general acceptance that having a filthy body and wearing filthy clothes is normal and you can begin to see the problems.

For most ,the idea of taking a bath is to wrap a krama around the body and slosh over some dirty well water. Thus, you are clean. It is totally acceptable in the areas that we work in that children are permanently filthy, not just grubby but ingrained to the point of almost indelibly filthy.. We all know that little kids get dirty every day but there is a huge difference in one days grubbiness compared to a lifetimes. Working in the dirt of the village my feet get pretty disgusting but they get cleaned every day. Imagine a lifetimes dirt. Imagine being eight years old and never having held a bar of soap in your hand. It is hardly surprising that you don't know what to do with it.

So we now have the permanent washing station at school. Primitive but effective. We have bowls for the water that have to be changed whenever they have been used. We have scrubbing brushes for feet and nails. We have nail clippers ,which keep disappearing, but I'm working on that. We have mountains of soap Every day I go there and reinforce what's needed. I am now greeted by shouts of 'sap-bo, sap-bo '(soap) and gales of laughter. We have posters up with 'do's and don'ts' Don't leave the soap in the water, do use soap, do keep your nails short and clean, change the water, etc. etc. I go around inspecting and send any miscreant off to get clean. Remarkably, I hardly have to do that any more. The children are policing it fairly well themselves. Fantastic.

There has been a massive decrease in the number of sores I have had to treat already. Down from around 50-60 per day to about 20. I am training a female teacher to be the 'school nurse' She will oversee the whole operation when I am gone and treat any minor injuries. Anything more major and we can arrange for the children to be brought into town to be seen. The PLF is paying for English classes for a man in the village with a moto. The payback is that he will taxi the children to the hospital for us for just the petrol money.

So simple, so much gain. Of course the real test will be if it is sustainable. I have faith, I have to though don't I? There are many things to work on still. They need to have cleaner clothes. We need to attempt to rid them of headlice and we need to teach some oral hygiene. Their teeth – where to begin? The vast majority of the kids at Knar have black, stumps rather than healthy white teeth. They NEVER clean their teeth, are stuffed full of sugar from the moment they are weaned from the breast and chew on sugar cane the whole time. In the village the only concept of dentistry is to pull a tooth out when the agony becomes too great. I would also like to do a screening for sight problems. Not a single child wears glasses in the whole school and I am quite sure that is not because they all have perfect vision.

As I type this I realise how small a victory, if it sustains, I have won. Getting clean is a significant, but small part of the overall problem. We need an oral hygiene plan, a clean clothes plan, a vision plan, a headlice plan. I've less than three more weeks here. Aargh! That six month Indonesian model is starting to look pretty speedy now.