By Charles Bennett

This week, Everlyn, Wilson and I headed off to visit three of the project villages – Amuapong, Poisinami and Siorovi in the Kokoda region. Our task for the week was to deliver health and hygiene education in all three villages, with the aim of spurring the construction of basic household toilets, or latrines.

At present, between 60 and 80 per cent of the people in rural Bougainville do not have a toilet, and the bush or a nearby stream is the most common alternative. It is our aim that by the end of the project all the households in our project villages will have constructed their own Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) Latrines. This is a key part of our work, as the health impacts associated with a clean water supply can only be achieved if used alongside good hygiene practices, specifically the use of a toilet.

The approach we are using is based on a methodology called Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), initially developed in Bangladesh. While controversial, the CLTS methods have found success in developing countries around the world. The method is based on working with the community members to identify their current hygiene and sanitation practices, recognising that these are often unhygienic and lead to illness, and then working with the community to change to more hygienic practices.

Community mapping is one of the main methods used in CLTS. First, someone from the village draws a simple map, showing houses, streams and any existing latrines. The community then marks on the map all the places where they currently go to the toilet – mostly in the bushes and streams. The community is then asked to mark all the places they go to the toilet when they’re really desperate – it’s dark, it’s raining, they have diarrhoea… It soon becomes clear that the map is covered in marks, including all around people’s houses.

Often this is enough for people to realise that their current behaviours are not healthy and makes them keen to change. We then work with the community to develop simple, low-cost ways to improve hygiene and sanitation, such as using latrines and hand washing after using the latrine and before handling food.

As people in the villages are busy during the day – children are at school, adults are farming, collecting food from gardens, cooking – we run the training in the evening after dark. Bringing a generator and a projector to show health promotion videos is a sure way to bring in the crowds in an otherwise quiet and dark jungle village!

We spent two nights in each village, running the training course in the evening and talking with the community, sharing stories and building understanding during the day. As with all community development work, it is crucial that we work closely with the people in the villages, empowering them to make their own decisions regarding the project, making sure we understand any concerns or issues with the project and trying to ensure that the people in the village understand the decisions we make.

It has been one of my favourite weeks in PNG, making new friends and appreciating the simple, close-knit family lives of the people in these villages.