Community education and awareness, though intangible, are underlying factors to effectively promoting public health. For example, safe drinking water dispensed from a ceramic water filter but into an unclean cup could still lead to illness. So teaching basic hygiene practices is fundamental, and integrating related learning activities into the agenda of local institutions is a mechanism our Public Health Promotion Program uses to sustain progress.
“I am sooo happy to be a Junior Doctor! I learned about hand-washing with soap and the importance of the toilet. Besides teaching my fourth and fifth grader friends about 7 steps of proper handwashing, I also practice this hand-washing at home so that my little sister can learn from me.” —Zara Zettira, Utan Kayu community
COMMUNITY EDUCATION
There is a definite lack of basic hygienic behaviours in the slum communities, especially among children. Our Public Health Promotion Program organizes community education classes and activities for adults and children to create hygiene behavior change agents for their families and community. The lessons do not require any formal education background, and refresher and deepening classes are provided for alumni groups as appropriate. We trained more than 140 adults in 2011, many of whom are now actively involved in leading hygiene behavior change education for their peer and children’s groups.
Activity Lessons for Children
To address the lack of hygiene behaviors, Yayasan Tirta Lestari holds Public Health Promotion classes for children 9-12 years old. We have 10 Take Home Messages that we structure lessons around, each with three hands-on activities to impress the message in practice. In 2011, our team taught a total 253 children, and many of these alumni are now Peer Trainers for the current student body.
Activity Lessons for Adults
Hygiene knowledge and practice is lacking in urban slum communities. Our team runs a project that targets building community capacity through local adult volunteers, or Cadres, whom we train on the same 10 Take Home Messages taught in our lesson series for children, though taught to them through activities tailored for adults. We currently have anywhere from 6 to 14 active Cadres in each community we work with.
Library
Although many of children in Jakarta’s slum communities attend school (though some rather intermittently), the curriculum does not include practical knowledge about hygiene practices that are especially needed in communities with water and sanitation issues. We constructed two Community Libraries in 2012, with Bintaro Baru and Teluk Gong, where each library has a water, sanitation, environment and hygiene theme. These libraries are one of the few available resources for residents to learn about wat-san topics on their own, while improving their reading skills. Our team facilitates the communities to manage their Community Library by developing a work schedule and reading activities to keep the library open and engaging. We started 2013 with 35 very dedicated children who regularly participate in reading activities, borrow books, and encourage their friends to join.
COMMUNITY AWARENESS
Raising awareness is a first step in mobilizing change. Typically we run broad-based socialization activities to reach as many people as possible, being mindful to include different age groups, socio-economic groups, and genders. Our Global Handwashing Day celebration with Utan Kayu Selatan in 2012 for example, reached approximately 120 people from the community, school, local government, as well as a small water filter business. That event subsequently led to an increase in hygiene project participation.
Hygiene Campaigns
The forum of our hygiene campaigns varies from household (Tupperware(R) party style) gatherings to community events. The dominant topic across all of our hygiene campaigns is handwashing with soap. The purpose of these campaigns are to stimulate improved hygiene practices. In 2012, the Posyandu (neighborhood community health group) we collaborate with in Bintaro Baru, adopted the Hand-Washing With Soap Campaign and reached more than 70% of members with children under five to practice hand-washing with soap.
PROGRAM SUSTAINABILITY
Transient residents (“squatters”) are not uncommon to urban scavenger communities. Many of the people in the communities we work with live there temporarily; they move to wherever they can find work and lack ownership to water and sanitation facilities and motivation to care for the condition of their living environment. Training and motivating trainers to replicate projects (even if that may be the next place they move to) and working with local institutions to contribute towards projects, are Yayasan Tirta Lestari’s two main strategies for program sustainability.
Training Trainers
Our classes are limited to 15 students each and there is more interest than available class spaces. We have been training our Cadres on how to teach others what they’ve learned in order for them to replicate this work. In Utan Kayu Selatan in 2012 for example, eleven Cadres started a weekly hour-long hygiene class for children, who in turn transfer what they learn to their siblings.
Community Incorporation
The communities we work with have tight neighborhood conditions and hence close relationships as they live in densely populated locations. Groups of men, women, and teenagers each have an organized association coordinated by local leaders to perform collective community activities when needed. Our team facilitates local leaders in organizing community actions pertaining to related projects, helping to optimize community contributions. Community contributions range from lending space in someone’s home to hold a class or meeting, to in-kind labor and land (as was the case with Teluk Gong in 2011 to build a 20 square meter Community Center).
This way of incorporating messages and actions into community group agendas by involving stakeholders in planning and contributing towards projects, builds ownership and likelihood of increasing projects’ life and reach. As a result in 2012 for example, 20% of households in Teluk Gong were actively involved and contributing towards improving their water and sanitation conditions through various activities such as Green and Clean, hygiene behavior change promotion classes for children and adults, composting, etc.