By Adama Kone, Teacher & Health Projects Coordinator

Sata Culbaly is an 8th-grade student at Judge Memorial Middle School of Sankama. She is a smiling and a very driven girl. Sata is 14 years old and likes school very much because she gets to see her friends in school every day.

Sata enjoys being in the school’s Mali Rising Health Club and teaching her classmates the best ways to wash their hands with soap.  Sata says that the Health Club in Sankama is a great thing because it inspires students to adopt great habits when it comes to washing hands and greeting without handshakes.

Sata is one of the most motivated girls in the Health Club and she often encourages other students to respect the COVID-19 prevention measures in school. She told us she is very concerned about the pandemic although there are no cases in Sankama. According to Sata, the only way to keep her school safe is to respect the prevention measures. She is a very dedicated girl trying to save her school and that is why she decided to be one of our Health Club members. When we visited the school, she was the first to volunteer to show how to wash hands with soap to the rest of the health club.

Sata confirmed that the work the Health Club has been doing is a bit challenging because there are some stubborn students who would just break the rules sometimes. However, she never gives up telling them how washing hands with soap correctly is important in their health.  She even said that sometimes when she explains handwashing and greeting rules to some students, she feels like some of them want to catch an illness! Sata also told us that one of their teachers, Mr Touré, has been helping them a lot so that the club could reach their goals which are to have students wash their hands with soap regularly and to greet each other without shaking hands or touching.

Sata and the rest of the club had to explain to other students a couple of times how to greet and how to wash their hands with soap. She said it was fun and challenging but in the end the achieved their goal of helping the other students really understand. Some students did not know why they needed to wash hands with soap or how they could greet without shaking hands. When they asked students to show different ways of greeting, it was so funny and everyone just went rolling on the floor laughing.

In addition to school, Sata likes her parents and helps them a lot. They are both living in Sankama, which makes her life much easier in terms of walking to school every day. Her father is a farmer and her mom is a household wife and (a jack-of-all-trades) doing a little bit of everything to get some income. Sata wants to be a doctor in the future and help her family and her whole community out.