Critically Healthy

Kids playing tug of war on top of "dirty" leaves.

In our other recent stuff we've mentioned that our next step with our CHE evangelists is to train them in setting up "Healthy Homes."  The idea is that there are a few basic and fundamental practices that are easily recognizable or easy to pick up from a small training, which help a household to not get sick so often and instead be thriving.  The small problem I'm noticing with our encouragement for people to strive for these "healthy homes" is that after a little education the community decides what the standards are for these themselves.  And then we as the trainers also have to live up to the "healthy home" standards they set.  In terms of sanitation, I know our home is excelling, but I also know that when people come to our house for the first time, they don't see what they expect as "cleanliness."

People walk into our compound and often one of the first things they say is it's dirty here because it doesn't look like we've swept our dirt yard.  The most visible thing there is the leaves that periodically fall off the fruit trees we have.  I guess it's like sweeping the floor or vacuuming for us in the US.  Or kind of like mowing the lawn or raking the leaves in Fall, but it's just not a big priority for us in our home here.  It stirs up the dust so much that it clogs your sinuses and gets more dust in the house.  But we try to do it more frequently now that our neighbors comment so much...

I can also understand a little more from their perspective that in a normal compound here you see kids pee out in the open in the yard.  People eat in the yard and leave food scraps.  Cooking water and scraps are also flung on the dirt adjacent to the kitchen area.  Many times people just throw litter wherever they're done with it, or it blows into the yard on the wind.  In many yards chickens, lizards, and sometimes even goats have run all around and deposited droppings on anything and everything.  While we don't have most of these things happening and so we aren't as worried about sweeping our dirt yard, it's fascinating to me how something we don't naturally see as important ends up being an critical part of our witness and relationships.

-- El Padre