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 bare-footed in case she catches hook-worm.