In Hangomba, we met the village chairman and executive officer in the building used by the local maize farmer cooperative. They are equivalent to mayor and city manager in US cities, as Chairman is elected and executive officer is a government post. We captured the following picture of the village map. It is about 2km across.
After walking to a nearby bonafide well, which requires you to bring your own bucket and rope, we continued our walking tour of the village. We visited the village square which was a large open field used monthly for a visiting market. We also walked 20min to the school through the fields of corn.
We met the deputy headmaster and members of the school council and teachers to discuss the project to build bathroom facilities for the school. Currently they have about 60 students per "hole in the ground" and no hand washing facilities. The recommended ratio from SEMA is 20:1 for girls and 25:1 for boys. The school officials acknowledged that students frequently complain of stomach ache which could be due to water contamination or poor hand washing practices. One of the other parts of our project is to raise awareness of the benefits of hand washing and to encourage the kids to build tippy-taps for their home use.
http://www.tippytap.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/How-to-build-a-tippy-tap-manual.pdf
We made a quick visit to a second village that will likely be a future project for Raleigh. There we discovered the most enormous spiders I've ever seen lurking on the ceiling of the bathrooms.
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