Water and Hygiene
By Leslie Hawthorne-Klingler

How often do you wash your hands? Do you wash your hands before you eat? After using the restroom? Before preparing food? When you wash, do you scrub for at least ten seconds with soap and water? Parents, do you insist that your children follow the same practices?

In late 2005, the American Society for Microbiology conducted a survey of over 6,000 adults in public restrooms around the country. The survey found that although 91 percent of adults said they wash their hands after using public restrooms, only 83 percent actually did so. Overall, women washed their hands 90 percent of the time, while men washed theirs only 75 percent of the time!

Fortunately, in the U.S., failing to wash one’s hands rarely leads to more than a minor cold or flu. Our culture has established enough disease blocking practices—such as customs and technologies that promote safe food preparation (e.g., clean kitchens, refrigerators)—to mitigate the consequences of our occasional careless hygiene practices. However, this is not the case in developing countries.

In many countries, simply failing to wash one’s hands often leads to fatal infection or disease. Thousands of children die every day of preventable diseases because they and others in their community have not been trained in the simple methods of blocking them.

Hygiene training is a vital companion to the introduction of safe water. Improving a community’s water supply generally reduces the incidence of diarrhea by approximately 15 percent. When improved water is combined with the introduction of hygienic practices, diarrhea incidences decline by up to 65 percent! For this reason Lifewater stresses that it helps people to not only access safe water, but also to use that water well.

Lifewater’s Community Health through Hygiene Program trains our Volunteer Trainers and partner organizations to teach good hygiene. By communicating people’s value in Christ (every life is a life worth saving), explaining disease transmission and blocking techniques, and demonstrating the skills necessary for healthful practices, new safe water sources are more effective in fighting disease.

Our partner organizations overseas welcome Lifewater’s hygiene training. They are acutely aware of the need for improved hygiene in the communities where they work to provide safe water.

For example, the Ethiopian Kale Heywet Church recently conducted a study of 3,817 households in 29 Ethiopian communities. The study showed that, in a region where one in every six children dies before the age of five (a high percentage of them die from diarrheal diseases), only 37 percent of those studied wash their hands adequately and only 18 percent use soap. The report concluded that hygiene training is crucial and should be an important part of their work.

By training partners such as the Kale Heywet Church, Lifewater’s Community Health through Hygiene Program is saving thousands of lives around the world. Read more about the program on page two, and check our website for important updates on Lifewater’s work in this area.