Shamima's story
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By Blue Chevigny
Shamima smiles with her life-saving watercolour picture, which teaches about good hygiene practices.
Shamima Shetu, 17, teaches her local community about good hygeine practices, and plays an important role in reducing water-borne diseases in her slum in Bangladesh.
Shamima goes door to door in her home community of Comilla, Bangladesh, armed with a set of simple instructions and a watercolour painting. The painting has two sides depicting two versions of the world – one where water is dirty and sanitation practices are unhealthy, the other where water is clean and community sanitation is good.
Shamima and her friend Dolly Akter, 16, are playing an important role in cleaning up their slum neighbourhood through UNICEF’s Environmental Sanitation, Hygiene and Water Supply in Urban Slums and Fringes Project. As adolescent hygiene monitors, the girls visit 20 homes in their area, checking whether neighbours are drinking safe water, using hygienic toilets, washing their hands before eating and after defecation, and disposing of rubbish properly.
‘A good way and a bad way’
The watercolour serves as a visual aid for what the girls are trying to teach. Shamima holds up the painting and explains.
“This is the bad situation,” she says, pointing to the right side of the page. “Some people here don’t have a fixed place for their garbage, so water and garbage are mixed. And the cows are drinking this dirty water, and the children are swimming in this water. And this is an unsanitary latrine, and this woman is washing her pot in the dirty river water.”
She then points to the left side of the page. “On this side it’s all clean,” she says. “They use hygienic latrines and this is water with soap to wash their hands. And this is a well, with clean drinking water. So we show that there is a good way and a bad way to live.”
Children making a difference
An estimated 2,500 people live in the one-square-kilometre slum district of Comilla, about 100 kilometres from Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. With such overcrowding, it is hard to see how people survive, let alone keep the area clean and healthy. Yet Shamima and her friends are making a difference. By monitoring and reinforcing simple hygienic behaviours, they are making the neighbourhood cleaner and its residents healthier.
“Before this programme I saw many unhygienic latrines,” recalls Shamima. “This was a great problem in my area. There were many waterborne diseases and water-related diseases. Now it is much more hygienic.”
A cleaner, healthier future
Although she and her friends are young, Shamima sees their potential to affect change as limitless. “Now we are small, but when we grow up we can teach our little brothers and sisters, the younger generation, to understand what is good and what is bad,” she says.
