- Lotla, a hygiene communicator recruited by our Dhaka, Bangladesh partner organization to talk to urban slum dwellers about hygiene practices, such as hand-washing, that will help reduce the incidence of diarrheal disease and respiratory infections.
The last time I went to my bookshelf looking for something to read, I spotted a book I originally read about 20 years ago, and decided to read it again. “Don’t Be Afraid Gringo” is the true story of Elvia Alvarado, a poor Honduran woman who becomes an activist in helping other poor Honduran farmers recover their farm lands in support of the written, but not enforced, national land reform laws.
Elvia is a courageous and brilliant woman, and as I read her words again, I remembered why so many years ago I was interested in the approach to projects that Water 1st is taking today.
Elvia’s work as an activist began whe she starting attending the mother’s clubs, organized by the Catholic Church. At the meetings, they’d talk about their problems and try to help each other out. Eventually, she was elected president of the club, and then she was invited by the church to a course for social workers. The words she says next make tears come to my eyes every time I read them because it is when I believe she first discovers the hope for a better future that she carries within herself:
I was so happy when I got to the church. I’d never been to a course before, and I was eager to learn. They read the roster: so-and-so, present; so-and-so, present. And when they said ‘Elvia Alvarado’ and I said ‘present,’ I was so proud. So were the other women.
Elvia’s words reflect what I’ve heard so many times from women in countries around the globe when they became involved in a community water project. Lack of access to clean water has a devastating effect on women and girls who are traditionally responsible for water collection. Collecting water is a difficult and time-intensive task, leaving women with little or no time to manage their households or participate in income-generating work. Illnesses in children and adults add to women’s workloads, as they are often the care-givers for the sick. Young girls often help their mothers collect water, making them unable to attend schools.
The hygiene educators often use pictures to help communicate their messages to their neighbors. Pictures work well because the beneficiaries of our projects are often illiterate.
Because women are the water carriers and managers of water resources for their families, our experience is that projects to improve water supply and sanitation are more likely to succeed when women are actively involved. The societies where we work are generally male dominated and so the work of involving women is not easy, and both women and men must buy-in to this approach for it to be successful.
During the planning stages of projects, women are a great resource. They know a lot about current water sources that could be used in the project - which sources are the cleanest and whether or not they still have water in the dry season. As the main water users and collectors, women are also the ideal people to select the locations of the new water points and be involved on the water committee that is responsible for fee collection and operation and maintenace activities.
It is through this active involvement, as a hygiene promoter or a member of the water committee or many other roles in which women are involved in projects, that I have encountered women like Elvia. Women who have discovered that they have something to offer to their communities, discovered the power within themselves. When projects are completed and the whole community is represented (men, women, and all families, not just the most influential families), I see women who used to sit at the back of the room are now speaking up with their opinions and observations. I see their daughters watching them, observing their new role models, role models that didn’t exist before.
Elvia also said this in her book, and it was an important message for me to hear in 1989 as I was studying civil engineering:
We Hondurans are capable of doing anything, if we had the education. But instead of teaching Hondurans, the government brings in these foreign experts with their huge salaries. And we continue to be idiots . . .We’re not going to solve our problem through handouts. Because our problem is a social one. And until we change this system, all the charity in the world won’t take us out of poverty.
Not only does bringing in outside experts prevent us from building the local capacity for Hondurans and others to solve their own problems, it’s also not very effective. In the communities where we work, hygiene education is most successful when hygiene educators are local people. Using a toilet, washing hands after using a toilet or before preparing food, hygenic menstruation. These are obviously sensitive topics, and thus when women from the beneficiary community are trained as hygiene promoters, they are able to talk freely with other women, mothers just like themselves, and spread their messages throughout the community. I find that village people are even intimated by well-meaning people from their own countries, people who they see as different from them because they come from larger towns and are more educated.
This idea of using community organizers to transform communities is not limited to hygiene education. PBS had a wonderful profile this weekend about America Bracho, a doctor who has successfully used the community-organizing or “promotores” model she had learned in her native Venezuela to educate drug addicts and prostitues in inner-city Detroit about AIDS and to improve the nutrition of low-income families in Santa Ana, California.
I often talk about how effective the hygiene education program is in our projects when villagers are trained as promoters. Dr. Bracho said it better than I ever could:
And again there we just did it with community workers. The peers, the people that can hear them and can reach them, the people that are not afraid to go into crack house because they have been an addict. And the people going to reach the sex workers in those streets, were not afraid of reaching them. But not only were they not afraid, they actually love them. You know, when you recruit this sex worker that is infected and now she becomes a community worker and she’s reaching other women, there is some level of love and solidarity. They are not just serving them to have a salary. They are serving them because they have been there, done that. And now they understand that they want these women to have a chance in life.
Posted by Marla Smith-Nilson, Executive Director
The event, complete with a Sound of Music costume contest, raised more
