Say it with flour

03/04/2008
Community health seminars in Guinea
BMS nurse Sarah Hall is working in Macenta, Guinea, alongside a team of Guinean nurses. She is helping to run a medical centre and reach out into the rural community by offering basic health care – especially to women and children.

Sarah has just begun working on a programme of community health, preparing seminars for groups of women.

She tells us: “Yesterday was a big day for us – we led our first seminar. It was with a group of 14 women in town. We taught on ‘wash your hands’.”

The seminars aim to be simple, practical and memorable. The first seminar included an ice-breaker that Sarah reports “worked brilliantly – three of the ladies dusted their hands in flour and then shook hands with the others ladies, an image of how germs can pass but we don't see them! There was much hilarity!”

Sarah continues, “Although the ladies in this group already knew a lot about washing their hands, we did touch on a few issues that they had not thought of before. The biggest problem we came up with was not a lack of water or soap, but rather not being able to control what other people do – especially those who handle food.”

The group has been set up so that one of the members of the group is put in charge of continuing to repeat the message. This means that all of the ladies understand it and start to put it into action.

There has already been a success story from the first seminar. Sarah says: “We had one brilliant testimony of a family who put into practice the message of the first seminar, ‘wash your hands’, and this stopped the whole family becoming sick when one member had diarrhoea.”

More seminars have been planned on various women’s health issues, such as healthy eating for all the family. The next seminar will take place in late April when the subject will be malaria.

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