Teaching for a healthier future

 

Over these past few months our team has been working to prep health and hygiene lessons in Tamasheq to present to various groups of people. Each month as we receive people for grain aid distribution, we are also offering health and hygiene education sessions, often handing out tools to help with their physical health. This first month the topic was hygiene, hand washing and explaining the concept of germs that make them sick. To link with this teaching we handed out 60 hand-washing stations so far and are in the works to construct many more!

First we taught the hygiene lessons to the men as they arrived. The information was well received and we have been invited to many of their homes to teach their wives and children as well.

One thing we heard when speaking with some of the families was they they didn’t know what was making them sick, or why they had diarrhoea. They had some ideas like bad water or bad food, but also they thought it could be bad spirits, a result of a immoral action or other things. Many of the Tuaregs in the city moved in to the city within the past 10-20 years. When they lived out in the desert they were spread out, there was less contamination and they say there was less illness. Here in the city they are often crammed together, they don’t move around like before as nomads and thus all their “dirty areas” build up and stay close. Close quarters brings more contamination as well. They admitted readily that they had not been able to understand or assimilate some of the changes that living in the city brought.

Prepping the Tippi-tap washing stations.

Boxes of soap to give out. We are planning to distribute bars of soap to the families every month that this food aid distribution runs.

One of our local partners showing other men how to put the water jug in and use it.

   

Then we took the same teaching material, plus some kid friendly games about hygiene and fun acted out sketches to the kids hut class, where we taught 20-ish children about hand washing.

Using 10 pictures all mixed up to create a story. The story is about one boy who drinks dirty water from a marsh and gets diarrhoea. The story tells how he contaminates others, and other people get sick. The kids had to pick out which picture went where in the storyline and we talked about how they could stop the transmission as well.

Then we marked their hands with Crayola kid’s markers with “Germs!” We hid the marks between their fingers, under their fingernails etc and then they went one by one to the hand-washing stations to wash away the “germs”

Look at all those clean hands!!

After class, they even all went out and washed their hands all over again! Let’s pray that true behaviour change slowly happens and improved hygiene becomes a normal part of their lives.

The week after the kid’s class I went to two different women’s group (hut class girls and the community women’s group) to give the same training.   All the women were great listener’s and asked questions.

They also enjoyed the same game with putting the pictures in order to tell the story of diarrhoea transmission.

We also marked the women’s hands with marker and fake “germs” and they also tried out the hand washing stations.

I love his little foot sticking out the side!

   

At the end of the class we handed out soap. In addition to what we bought for the aid distribution center, we had 5 large boxes of soap donated through Lutheran World Relief and each box had an assortment of several hundred bars of soap. We hope to hand all these out over the next few months. It was funny to see bars of Zest, Dove, Ivory, no-name and a bunch of tiny hotel soaps all mixed together.

   

The kids also got in on the loot and took the tiny hotel soaps.

Me with most of the ladies the second class. Thanks for the soap!

Please pray that our efforts to introduce health teaching every month for the next 7 months would pay off not only in bringing better health and hygiene to our national friends and a better quality of life, but also to opening doors to even more relationships for us.

Little boys will be ninjas, no matter where they are from.

We just got home from having supper at our friend’s house. In our bedroom, my thermometer tells me it is 36.8 degrees. Wow. Driving home from hut class this afternoon my steering wheel was so hot I considered putting oven mitts in the car for the rest of hot season (good idea Beth!). Yikes!

SO hot season has truly hit with full force. 

So besides all this talk of hot, which will last months now, I thought I would make you smile with pictures of Bennett and his buddy Souliman, and the kids playing. Souliman is the little boy who has terribly bad eczema on his feet, so bad that they crack and bleed and look scaly like a lizard. So we happily keep them stocked with imported “Georges” cream which works wonders and we are happy to report his feet look the best we have seen them in a long time! Bennett and Arielle ran around with 4 other little children (none of them sharing a common language with ours) and had a blast. The got involved in some pretty serious WWF Goat Wrestling which was pretty hilarious to watch. I got video, but sadly can’t upload it. So instead you will have to enjoy some pics!

This is our friends house. Not the mammoth cement house being built in the background, but the small grass shack with black plastic for a roof. See their metal bed with wooden sheet for a mattress next to the door? What a dichotomy.

Bennett and Souliman hamming it up

and giving us their best spontaneous ninja poses! (this was taken seconds before Souliman peeled away to spin and kick and make terrific warrior noises!)

Arielle gets in on the goat wrestling

 

These two little ones were having their own conversation. Their body language totally says it all. The little boy saying something like “Hey…are you going to put that bowl back in there with the others?” And Raichatou (the little girl) saying “What, do you think I was born yesterday or something? Come on!” Another funny observation. Back home if the little kids run around half naked, it is usually with a pair of underwear and nothing else. Here, it is always a t-shirt and nothing else!

Paul got in on the fun and provided a one man circus by flipping all the kids over and spinning them. They loved it!

One of my favourite little girls, Raichatou. Her parents call her “trouble!” Which was my nickname as a kid too! Isn’t she precious!

   

So I hope wherever this finds  you, it is cooler than here! Take care!

 

-Chantelle

Visitors from home !

Recently for two weeks we had the pleasure of having visitors from home! As part of an initiative to have people visit the “fields” of the Alliance after a large bi-annual conference in Turkey, our team received 12 people here in Niger. 6 of those people were tied to us and our church in Calgary! Our Pastor Shawn, his wife Gini and his two small children AND his parents (a three generation group!) came to spend two weeks with us here in Niger. (check out the giraffe in the background!)

I have asked Shawn to write a guest blog here on his perceptions and experiences of Niger, so hopefully in the next few weeks you will see that here. But for now I thought I would post a few pictures of their trip and some of the highlights of what we did with them!

Shopping for African necklaces with Gini

We took them several times to our outdoor markets where we buy lots of our food and household items. They were amazed that you could buy veggies, carpets, backpacks,  shoes, underwear, tea, plastic basins, cloth and everything in between all in one aisle!

*picture not taken by me. I’d love to give credit..but I don’t remember who did take it.

We put Shawn to work building tippi-taps with Paul

Gini came to hut class several times. (You can see her in the back here)

Everyone came to visit the first day of our Grain Aid distribution.

Gini looking so stylish!

 

There were always kids around us. They love seeing other little children, so our “white” kids always drew attention from other children. But it was never in a negative way, they just wanted to play!

We hosted a Tuareg music and cultural evening for all our Canadian visitors. It was at the home of a National just out of town. There was a rice and sauce meal, millet/milk cold porridge drink and dates to eat. There was a traditional drum played and a good group of local Tuareg guitarists. I think all of our visitors had a great time, getting up and dancing, trying the drums, playing with the kids and sharing culture. Many of our Canadian visitors spoke French so they were able to interact directly with our National friends, which was a wonderful way to connect and talk and learn.

The kids kept asking to have their pictures taken and then would look at it with glee on the display screen after.

Shawn got a turban given to him by this man Saidi. Shawn gave him his hat in return.

We went to the giraffe reserve. It never ceases to amaze me there. And our visitors always find it equally amazing! It was a very dusty day so it was hard to get crisp pictures, but I managed to be standing by ready when a group of them took off running and got a whole series of them running across the savannah.

Here is Kiam checking out his first ever giraffe, sitting calmly 30 feet in front of him. “Dad – I know it’s just a giraffe but he’s scary!”
 

 

We also went to the sand dunes, one of our favourite places to take visitors.

I had fun taking some photos of Shawn and Gini. For some reason I really loved this one :) Gini might kill me, but I wanted to show it anyhow. I didn’t even edit it in Photoshop! I like to call it “Divine Conception” !

 

As I talked about in my previous post about the great care package they brought, their visit was a huge encouragement to us. We are isolated here, and it means so much to have family or friends come to see us and share in what we are doing. Thank you so much to the entire Vickar family for coming to Niger!