By Matthias Saladin | Project communicator
In this update, we want to tell you a story about a resourceful teacher. His name is Antonio Choque and he work for the school “Carhuani” in the municipality of Independencia in Bolivia. Like many other teachers in this area, he teaches kids of several grades at the same time. His 14 pupils are between 6 and 12 years of age.
Antonio is really committed to promote hygiene practices, safe water and sanitation to each of his students. Last year, he participated in several of the workshops organized by the SODIS Foundation for this project in order to train and motivate teachers to implement simple practices for improving water and hygiene conditions at schools. One of the simple measures is the establishment of “healthy corners”, which are tables where pupils store safe drinking water and clean cups. As the project did not provide such tables for all class rooms, Antonio decided to make one with locally available resources: plastic bottles and a pressboard (see picture). This table made of recycled materials at no cost now serves as the “health corner” in Antonio’s class room, and the kids are using it regularly. This simple story tells us how importance it is to train people and to enable their creativity for finding locally adapted solutions. After all, our project is not about “feeding the hungry”, but about “teaching them how to fish”.
Given the need and with his own creativity, he created a platform to organize his corner of safe drinking water. In the educational unit, they only have distributed five “tarimas” and have six classrooms. Antonio managed to create a small table for his barrel and glasses with only pressboard and plastic bottles.
Currently, we are also training teachers and students on how to produce soap for hand washing. Again, we are seeing how important it is to foster creativity and make use of existing materials and resources – we will tell you about this in our next report.
We hope this report was useful for you. If you liked it, please share it with other people who may be interested in supporting a project like this. Thank you in advance!
Best regards from the whole project team,
Matthias Saladin
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
