Engage schools to invest in healthy lifestyles

By Lulu Itipa

What runs through your mind whenever midterm for Ugandan boarding schools approaches? Visitation day! 

Does it bother you that the dates are chosen to fall either on Saturdays or Sundays? Not really, because over weekends parents and guardians are spared a little from every other weekday’s hurdles to earn a living.

The teachers too are relieved a bit from daily classroom chores to handle the visitation day programs over the weekends. The visitation day ranks high for students, competing very closely with only two others.

These are invitation day for a dance (social, swagg) and day of close of term for holidays. But the visitation day stands out. This is because of what it normally spells – joy of reuniting marked by hugs, laughter over eats and drinks, taking pictures and poking fun at each other.

For canteens, visitation days spell bumper money harvest, more so in schools that do not allow parents to bring along eats and drinks. But during visitation days, have you ever taken interest in the hygiene conditions in which the children study and live?

Hygiene that the World Health Organization (WHO) holds to mean ‘conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases’,  is best assessed when you take a tour of the toilets (latrines), bathrooms, classrooms, dormitories, staffrooms, stores and kitchens.

Reaching these areas is among the issues the Patriotism Secretariat, Office of The President has listed during its visitation days to monitor and support patriotic club activities in secondary schools and post-secondary institutions of learning.

While most of the schools have neat compounds, the general trend is that the toilet habits of our children are deficient and so, hazardous. It is not uncommon to see fecal matter on the walls, meaning the children clean themselves there after the act.

Remedy? Roughcast walls. Worse, some deposit the waste matter on the floor of the latrines, further littering them with used toilet tissues and pieces of paper.

Again, hand-wash containers are uncommon in and at the toilet entrances.  Yet hand hygiene is important in everyday life; hands reach practically everything that surrounds us and our body parts too like mouths, eyes and nostrils.

The bathrooms are no better. The correct way is to allow the children maintain the latrines and bathrooms to be clean, neat and prevent stench and allergies.  Some of the kitchens require improvement in cleanliness and orderliness, including food stores. So do the dormitories, classrooms and staffrooms.

Does gender have any significance at all in hygiene in schools?

Sure it does. The girls are generally cleaner and tidier than the boys; so are the Teacher Training Colleges than the secondary schools. This certainly does not disregard some exception to the contrary but only that it underscores the generality.

So by this sharing, my hope is that we shall engage schools and our children to invest in healthy lifestyles; after all, the word hygiene is said to have been derived from the name Hygiea, the Greek goddess of heath. In a word health is – holy!

The writer works with the Patriotism Secretariat