“…Pour la bonne santé!”

This past Friday, the health sector was given the task of teaching a class on a health issue of our choosing. We were divided into four groups. We share the school where we receive our training with the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) sector and they began their “model school” training 1.5 weeks ago. Each health sector group was assigned a TEFL class of schoolchildren and that was the target audience. The picture above is a typical classroom.

My group of three taught a class on the importance of hand washing for the prevention of disease and maintenance of good health. Indoor plumbing is a luxury here, and the majority of people have latrines. I am yet to see a latrine with a sink and a bar of Dove by the faucet, meaning that a large number of people do not wash their hands after using the bathroom, especially children, and leads to the contraction of numerous maladies.

We organized our materials and worked with my ever-patient language instructor to prepare our French hand washing presentation. He also worked with us to identify classroom management strategies and ways of retaining the attention of an 8-year old. Eeks.

Our class was a group of thirty-seven 8-11 year olds, though age is fairly difficult to gauge here given that few people know their exact birthdays. With my functional-at-best French, I had to rely upon my ability to make a fool of myself to hold their attention. Fortunately, that’s one of my more reliable characteristics. I had the honor of speaking about the bacteria that can live on your hands and make you sick if you don’t wash your hands; this provided a prime opportunity to make use of creepy-crawly gestures and correlating facial expressions. By the time I was done, most of them looked sufficiently disgusted. Success.

Then we taught the class a song about hand washing written by a member of my group with the refrain being “Laver-vous les mains, pour la bonne santé!” (Wash your hands, for good health!) Up next: a hand-washing demonstration. Never has a group of kids looked more intrigued by lathering soap. Then we asked for volunteers who would like to show the class how to wash their hands. 19 kids swarmed the front of the classroom, eager to share their enthusiasm for good hygiene.

As the attention span of schoolchildren was nearing exhaustion, we moved on to the next activity. We organized a modified match of musical chairs around the circular courtyard garden. This garden was approximately 17 feet in diameter and had a cement soil retention wall that was about 3.5 feet high in most places, and a flagless flag pole in the center. We had marked thirty-two X’s with chalk on the cement wall prior to the start of class as the “chairs” in this modified game. With thirty-seven kids in the class, five would be unable to find an X, and each of the five would then have to answer a question about hand washing. For fear of the chaos that would surely ensue if kids were actually asked to sit out for the remainder of the game, everyone was allowed back into the game at the end of each round. I stood in the center of the garden and fulfilled my responsibility in this outfit as DJ/monitor for kids to walk at a normal pace without pausing at each X/dance fiend. And while the five ousted students answered questions, I was hand shaking, high-fiving, and teaching kids to pound it, as a form of gold star substitute. The musical selection was chosen from a playlist entitled “250 Best of the 90’s;” Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” and Sugar Ray’s “Fly” have never served a better purpose. The students danced with incredible coordination, all the while laughing and making it look easy. It began to rain, so we returned to the classroom before the entire courtyard became one mud puddle. To close, we asked if there were any questions, then sang the hand washing song one final time.

The children had an incredible appetite for knowledge that could be seen in their wide-open eyes, too scared to blink for fear of missing something important. This was a great opportunity to experience another setting that I will potentially be working in over the next two years. So everybody remember, lavez-vous les mains, pour la bonne santé!