Educational Support for Children in Iraq

Hygiene promoters in the local community are trained to do door-to-door visits

The picture shows the promoters practicing with one another during the training. In March, they started doing real door-to-door visits, during which they taught proper hygiene practices and asked residents to refrain from dumping wastes in the common drainage.

The group of Community Hygiene Promoters has been growing larger and larger. It now consists of about 50 male and female volunteers who actively help spread the hygiene knowledge among local people. Those volunteers come from diversified backgrounds and have various careers, but they all carry the passion to make the community better.

Here, we would like to introduce a special member of the Community Hygiene Promoter, who is a 22 years old male living in the camp where JEN is working. He is an IDP (Internal Displaced Person) from Kurdistan.

The disability of his leg was caused by medical malpractice when he was a child. As a result, he has been using a cane ever since. In spite of his disability, he actively conducts tent-to-tent visits for hygiene promotion, participates in the camp’s Cleaning Day, and attends Community Hygiene Promotion meetings.

In fact, the camp is not an easy place for disabled people to live in because of its hills and the gravel roads. In addition, the camp is actually fairly large in the absence of convenient transportation.

A JEN staff asked him about the reason why he is so active and why he wanted to be a Community Hygiene Promoter at the very first place. He answered, “I wanted to advise people and support people. There were not any volunteer groups in my hometown, but I think this kind of volunteerism is very necessary to ensure the health of people living in the camp. Also, I just really like this volunteer work.”

The JEN staff then asked him if he felt any changes after conducting tent-to-tent hygiene promotion. He answered, “I think before tent-to-tent visits, people always used water to clean tents and wash cars even though water scarcity had already been reported in some areas. There were also a lot of children walking outside without wearing shoes. After hygiene promotion, I feel that those behaviors have been greatly reduced.”

JEN will continue to facilitate such action of promoting proper hygiene practices in the camp.