By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Manager
Aminata demonstrates her new handwashing skills at a January 2022 Mali Rising handwashing training at her school.
The Little Heroes Academy I Middle School of Mana has more than one hundred students. The school has many challenges to address. One of the main challenges is how to keep kids healthy and be able to attend school. Mali Rising is doing our small part to help with that challenge, by providing hygiene education classes.
In Mali rural schools, kids struggle a lot with health, which dramatically harms their school attendance. Some of the diseases that the students struggle with can be avoided with simple hygiene techniques, such as proper handwashing. Most kids in Mali do not regularly wash their hands with soap or, even if they do, they do not know how to do it properly.
Earlier in January, Mali Rising hosted a hand washing training in order to teach students how to wash their hands with soap properly. Forty-five students were trained on how to wash hands with soap properly.
Aminata Samaké is one of the students who benefited from the hand washing training. Aminata is 15 years old, is in the 9th grade, and likes school very much.
Aminata had never attended a hand washing training before, and she told me she was very excited to be at the training. Aminata volunteered to show her peer students how to wash hands with soap properly after I demonstrated the process to the group. Aminata also encouraged her classmates to wash hands with soap as much as possible knowing that their hands could have germs at any time without their knowing. She insisted that students should wash hands any time they eat, cook, go to the bathroom, or after they cleaned up after a poopy baby! After the training, Aminata told me she would even train some people from her family on the proper ways to wash their hands with soap. She said that the training was very useful to her.
Aminata and some her classmates also competed on how to wash their hands with soap properly after they were taught how to do it. The students made fun of each other as they competed — critiquing each other's technique.
Aminata told her classmates that if they would like to be great students, they would have care about their health in order to stay healthy. Aminata said, “Being unhealthy will mean poor work at school." She also said that many students get sick from dirty hands and then miss out at class. Aminata added that if they do not wash their hands with soap, it would be hard for them stay healthy and some of them might get seriously sick and eventually pass away from sicknesses.
Aminata was very thankful to Mali Rising Foundation for the training in her school. She thinks that this could save lives if students complied with all the proper ways as needed.
