Healthy Living
This is Patience. She is a primary school teacher in
Nigeria, West Africa. She teaches children how to
make good hygiene a part of their lives. Do you
know what hygiene means?
Patience enjoys teaching songs about healthy living.
Her favourite one begins, ‘Hygiene is love, hygiene
is unity. How do songs help us to remember things?
The children love Patience’s songs. They have
catchy tunes with words that are easy to remember.
They sing them to their friends in the playground and
to their families at home.
Patience always thinks of her children’s health. She
tells them, “Wash your hands” – before you eat,
after you go to the toilet, before you scoop water
from the container, and after you touch rubbish!
Why is it so important to wash our hands?
Warok school is in the countryside. It got its first well
three years ago. Before that, the villagers collected
water from holes in the ground like this one.
Women and children used to walk for many miles to
get this water. They carried heavy buckets on their
heads for several hours a day. Some children
missed out on school.
In 2005 the villagers worked with WaterAid to install
a hand-pump well as well as a new school toilet
block. What are they using to scoop out the water?
Warok school is now a healthy place to learn. More
children come to classes and they rarely get ill.
Before, there used to be 10-15 children absent
everyday with diarrhoea.
This is Yahna (on the left) with her best friend
Nankpan. They go to the school’s Hygiene Club to
learn about all the ways we can keep clean and
healthy, like washing our hair, cleaning our teeth
and cutting our nails.
Yahna’s mum is very proud of her. She says, “since
she joined the Hygiene Club Yahna has become
madly keen and keeps at her brothers and sisters
about good health”.
This is Mansoh. He is ten years old and head of the
school’s Hygiene Club. He sings songs to the
younger children about how to keep the house
clean.
Mansoh wants his parents to build a toilet at home.
Here he is telling his mum not to walk around barefooted in case she catches hook-worm.