Una actividad de higiene en Chané

This Monday some Brazilian professors of some universities, who work with another JICA project in Brazil, visited the FORSA in Santa Cruz. Basically they are doing a similar thing, or Health Promotion cooperated with JICA and other Brazilian organizations for the people who are unavailable to resources. But the FORSA is quite ahead in the stage. The project in Brazil just began recently, while the dawn of the project FORSA dates back to 2001. We, FORSA, already are in the stage of evaluation and this October the project is going to be over.

The Wednesday those Brazilians and we visited Chané, or a small village in the prefecture of Santa Cruz. The people of this place is the first targeted group where the FORSA project took place in 2001, which means that in this village the people have conducted various participatory activities cooperated with FORSA over 4 years.

At the evening the FORSA people and the Brazilians got to the village by van. It took over 2 hours. Up until the gate of the village the road was paved beautifully with concrete. Then right after that, the road became bloody dusty, muddy and full of bumps. Then, yea, the pictured countryside scenery just showed up. Most of the roofs of their houses were made of straw. The fences were not steel, nor woods, but cactus. Their domestic animals, sheep, pigs, hens, oxen, caws or whatever was everywhere where you go. Can you imagine that the city Santa Cruz is just a duplicate of Miami, but if you drive 2 hours you will be in the middle of nowhere? The further the van advanced into the village, the more I got culture shock.

At the sole health center of Chané we had 2 hours discussions with medical staffs and volunteers of the villagers, mostly mothers who have been involved with the FORSA project for a few years. Afterwards, around 8PM a hygiene activity of the villagers began. On a huge truck covered with a white cloth a PowerPoint was projected. There were about 150 villagers gathered at a school basketball outdoor court to watch the hygiene presentation. The participants were unnaturally silent gluing themselves to gain the knowledge. After the PowerPoint thing, the volunteers of the villagers made a comedy play giving some examples to show the importance of hygiene.

At this moment I decided to contribute myself to the community. Of course, this village IS included to the area I am officially assigned to work at, but what I am saying is not just because of the formal reason, it is because that I know those motivated villagers and their independent activities would keep providing me the reason to work hard and to be here as rural development officer.