Members of the community were suspicious when Carol said that all the children needed to do to get rid of the infections was to wash their eyes. Within two weeks all the infections had cleared up. The health volunteers were like hard cement, but the children are like soft clay that you can mold. The children have been open to ideas that adults resisted and have provided an inroad into the rest of the community. By teaching children the effect spills over into the home.
Children teach their parents.
Washing their hands and brushing their teeth has a big impact because these are things they learned in schools. We began to notice that the best health volunteers we were trying to train were the children. We are creating health volunteers within the community by training children. The couple is now working with 2,200 students in 14 schools around Colomoncagua. We visited one of those schools, Las Marias, where 70 students study in one classroom with no toilets or running water.