Need for the Right Sanitary Education

It’s crucial to educate parents before to habituate children to sanitation in their daily life. That is why JEN’s sanitary education team launched a training session at the parents meeting, a counterpart of Parent-Teacher Association in Japan, teaching parents and school teachers various things, from a proper way to wash hands to an appropriate knowledge on the child-specific infection and the menstruation.

In Hawara Basic School for Girls, based on the hearing from the principal, the session was set to provide necessary information of the prevention and appropriate response to infectious diseases, as well as sanitation education.

As for infectious diseases, we mainly talked about lice and skin diseases, which affect children most. In many cases, parents and children are too ashamed of being infected with lice to go to hospital, so we usually teach them the first aid to cope with it at home.

Furthermore, we talked about the mensuration as the session took place at the girls school. Out of convention, many parents still find the conversation on mensuration tabooed, which often causes the confusion among girls with their first period. We stress the important role for parents to explain to their children what it is. Although it’s easy these days to get access to various information through the internet, it may be hard to tell if it’s right or wrong without proper knowledge. So we commit ourselves to providing the correct information on mensuration. As there has been few occasion so far to talk about this subject, the session continued for more than 2 hours with tons of questions asked from parents and teachers.

We do expect that those about 120 participants, mostly mothers and teachers, will pass what they learned on to their children and communities later on.