Latex Gloves Demonstrate Basic Health Principle
With the help of a latex glove and some papier mache, an Ethiopian health animator knows how to get the attention of a roomful of villagers. Mathios, their instructor, has constructed a doll using papier mache for the head and a latex glove for the abdomen. An iv tube feeds water into the doll’s mouth and expands the latex glove, giving the doll’s tummy a plump healthy look.
Mathios begins to tell the tale of a family of five children living in a typical nearby village, a place where citizens use the streets and alleys as their toilets. As his story unfolds, water begins to spring from leaks in the doll’s latex glove tummy. The doll starts to shrink as the villagers are told that several of the story’s children have contracted life threatening diarrhea as a result of feces contaminating their water and their food. The doll suddenly goes completely limp in Mathios’ hands, fluid depleted and all life gone, as he tells his audience that two of the family’s children have died of severe dehydration.
This dramatization is not in the least bit a reach for Mathios’ listeners. They live and work in a village where the streets smell strongly of human waste and the moral of his tale is quite evident. Educating the people and introducing them to public sanitation will greatly reduce diarrheal dehydration that is a major contributor to their child mortality rate.
To show visitors how the “latrine message” is getting across to his audience, Mathios takes us across town for a tour. “We have a model latrine here that is made from locally available resources. Using that, we teach them,” he tells us. A very tiny tukul a round Ethiopian hut), stands to the side of the village’s central shop which sells staples such as flour and sugar. This little tukul is a “working model” latrine that shows people how one is meant to be constructed and used.
“Everybody comes here. And when they come, we teach,” says Mathios. Guards, hired by the NGO that sponsors Mathios’ program, are responsible for the latrine’s maintenance while health animators teach people how to build simple ones for their own home areas. The home latrine is no more than an appropriately located hole in the ground with a stone to cover it.
Sure enough, as the visitors walk along their village tour, they look up at a nearby ridge and spot a child barely more than a toddler dutifully dragging a flat stone lid back across the top of a latrine his mother had made for him. It is evident that the serious lesson of the doll with the latex glove tummy got across to this family.
The author, glove industry analyst Jen Long lives in Summerville, SC. As Director of Web Community Support for an online retailer selling Latex and Latex-Free Gloves, Jen offers a gloves chemical resistance chart to her readers, Gloves Chemical Chart.
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