The Birthday: Part 1 (The Charla)

My first birthday away from home started with a halt. I overslept and woke up to the sound of a fellow volunteer knocking on my front door — 5 minutes after I was supposed to meet her.

I jumped up, let her in, apologized profusely, threw on some clothes and walked briskly with her to the bus stop to meet the rest of our health training group. I was excited. Not because it was my birthday. But because it was our first charla in a primary school.

Our topic: handwashing. Not exactly a show-stopping topic, but we'd worked out what we thought was a pretty good 30-minute lesson plan, and I was a little nervous our 5th and 6th grade classes would be bored. [Spoiler alert: They weren't. It was awesome.]

We started off with a giant drawing of a hand and held it up for the class to see. Does this hand look clean or dirty? We asked the students. Clean! They shouted back. And from a distance, it looked like it totally was. But when two volunteers came up to take a closer look, they discovered that, in fact, there were tiny yellow dots drawn inside the hand. They're are germs! they called back to their fellow students.

What are these germs? We asked them. What do they do? Where do we find them?

Then we had them go around the room and touch everything they could see. The floor, the walls, the desks, their chairs — everything — until their hands were good and dirty. After, we put a drop of oil on their hands, and they put their hand print on a white sheet of paper. With the help of the oil, the dirt transferred from their hands to the paper. And alongside each handprint, we wrote the student's name.

When we brought them all outside to wash their hands, we went over again how important it was to rub every inch of your hands, fingers, nails and wrists — and to use lots of water and soap. To make sure they spent enough time getting to all those tough-to-remember places, we asked them to sing Happy Birthday to me in both English and Spanish. I have to stop and tell you: it was adorable.

Some of the students were really excited that we were from the US. Speak to me in English, they kept asking me. Sing me a song in English. They crowded all around me asking their questions. How do you say 'I love you'? What does 'this is my supper' mean?

When we got back to the room, we sat in a circle and played hot potato with a ball of wadded up sheets of paper. On each sheet was a question, and when we stopped singing (you guessed it) Happy Birthday, the student with the papa caliente had to answer the question.

Of course, they knew all the answers. They've had hand-washing educational sessions before. But even still, it's not a strictly practiced part of the culture. Even if the students were diligent enough to remember to wash their hands after playing with stray animals (which freely roamed around the school grounds), there wasn't soap in the bathrooms for them to use. And that was a little disheartening. The teachers, however, were incredibly supportive and seemed equally as excited to have us in their classrooms. They were even kind enough to let us leave the handprinted sheets of paper hanging up in the classroom.

As far as a first charla went, I was really excited when I left. The students were sad to see us leave and wrote us little notes thanking us for coming. It was just washing hands. Something they'd heard dozens of times before. But to be honest, it was the first time I'd been thankful to be so unavoidably gringa. Because you know that some of them probably went home and told their parents about these three American girls with funny accents who came to their classroom and talked about washing their hands ...