| Children Health Education Training Including H1N1 Prevention Held in 6 Schools of Chun Hua Program Unit |
By 21st October, a cumulative total of 1092 confirmed cases of H1N1 has been reported in Shaanxi Province. It is learnt that the first confirmed case has also been found in Chun Hua County. According to this situation, from 13th to 21st October, Chun Hua PU and Chun Hua Education Bureau cooperatively carried out training on children health education in 6 schools where the joint project by Plan and Metso is being operated. |
 “In our village, we have a self-made saying: often air bed-clothes out of doors only do us good and frequent clothes-washing and bathing make us clean; never forget hygiene education all the year round; and we will live a long healthy life by preventing diseases.” “All the families in our village have had sanitary toilets, and they are clean, odorless and without flies. We all like to use them very much.”All these descriptions on the environmental changes as well as awareness-raising activities mentioned above were actually made by several children from five Plan program areas in the Final Evaluation Workshop of Water and Environmental Sanitation (WES) Programme held on 10th September 2009 in Xi’an. Also, these children not only brought their well-prepared paintings to the conference hall, and showed the practical changes happened on their villages, schools and families under the help of Plan China’s WES programme which had lasted for 5 years, but also spoke out freely and express their own feelings as well. Moreover, Sun Fangli, the community representative of San He Township of Pu Cheng County, expressed her opinions and comments on activities held in her community like water supply project, sanitary toilet construction project and the promotion of hygiene habit. She particularly emphasized the changes brought by community mobilization on villagers, especially women. For instance, in terms of water problems, they spontaneously set up a water steering committee consisting of three women in charge of monitoring daily water-saving of the community. According to the evaluation report, 436 communities and 55 schools have benefited from this WES programme launched in 2005, and the total number of beneficiary families is 62,445. Within WES programme, water supply project and sanitary toilet construction project, environment improvement activities, villagers’ capacity building trainings and child-friendly school projects had been implemented; with the cooperation of institutions and departments like Provincial Bureau of Environmental Protection and Township Government, Green Civilization Model project had been implemented in 37 schools and 49 communities, attracting government matching funds of more than 14.4 million RMB and involving more than 260 staff members. The participants affirmed the positive effects of WES programme, especially on sanitary and environmental awareness promotion of communities and changes of women and children’s concept. In terms of improvement of follow-up projects, the programme officer stressed how to achieve better balance and coordination between community capacity building and hardware constructions in order to weigh the long-term and short-term objectives, how to broaden programme perspectives as well as methods to develop and build a programme mode based on software and hardware constructions of water supply and sanitary toilet, and how to strengthen the cooperation with the government and optimize resources.
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