Environmental Health Leadership Initiative (EHLI)

What we have done:

From December 22-24, 2013, Parthu Kalva administered a 10 question survey to over 60 children to get an understanding of the children’s habits and knowledge surrounding waste management, environmental sanitation, and hygiene. Around 25 of those children were from the Health Club at PRG Middle School, a government primary school in the Siruvani region. The ‘Health club’ is a concept that has become increasingly popular in government primary schools in India. Health clubs empower children to voice their concerns on sanitation and health issues affecting their school and work together to complete a project on it. 

One of the questions administered on the survey was, ‘ There is a lot of trash in the back of the school. Your teacher tells you to clean up the trash. What do you do?’ Although the correct answer was to segregate the trash upon collection, many of the students chose the answer that they would collect the trash and then burn the trash! It was at that point that Parthu realized that waste segregation was something highly worth focusing on.  

The next day, Parthu bought two large plastic bins, one red and one blue. He drafted a Powerpoint presentation featuring red slides listing out what to put in the trash bins and blue slides listing out what to put in the recycling bins. At PRG Middle School, he presented these slides to the kids with the help of a translator. He also was sure to emphasize NOT to burn both trash and recyclables.

After conducting a practice waste segregation activity with sample pieces of waste, Parthu handed out small garbage bags to half of the students and gloves to the other half. Then, he asked those with bags to pair up with someone with a glove and go out into the playground and pick up 30 pieces of trash.

After 10 minutes of collecting trash, Parthu had the children form a circle outside, with the red bin on one side and the blue bin on the other.  The children then came into the middle of the circle two groups at a time and dumped their trash in the center of the circle. Running between each bin, the children of those two groups proceeded to segregate the trash in the two bins. Aside for placing papers in the red trash bin a few times, the children did a very good job in segregating the trash.

Health Club members proudly show off the results of the Waste Segregation Activity

What Parthu noticed during lunch was that though the students washed their hands at a wash station, there was no soap to be found or was being used. Asking one of the boys where the soap was, he proceeded to take Parthu back inside the school and asked an older girl to take out the soap. She proceeded to go into a storage area, where a bar of soap was stored on the top of an old shelf. Apparently, the soap was not being used by the children to wash their hands.
As a result, on the third day of working with the kids, Parthu focused on the importance of washing one’s hands before eating, using analogies, videos, and pictures to get the message across.

Schoolchildren eating their noon meal

In order to ensure the students continued to segregate their waste, Parthu drafted a list of what goes into the trash and recycling on two separate posters and attached them to trash cans. In order to ensure the students continued to segregate their waste and use soap to wash their hands, Parthu told the teachers that each week, a new group of 4 Health club students were to segregate trash disposed in the bins twice a week. A different group of 2 Heath Club members were assigned to enforce the usage of soap before meals. To help enforce this, a sign up log for the kids to keep track of those on waste segregation duty and soap duty each week was created.

Parthu Kalva holding the Recycling lid sign and list of recyclable materials. The amount of money provided per kilo for each material when given to the scrap store was also provided.

For more info on scrap stores, read the post entitled "Don't Throw your Waste, Give your Waste." under December 2013 trip.

The signs to be attached to the compost bin, trash bin, and recycling bin. The compost list contains items such as egg shells, bananas, leaves, etc. The trash sign states that anything not belonging in either Compost or Recycling must be placed into it

What we will do:

This experience motivated Parthu, Naman Gupta, and Shyamprasad Radhakrishnan to further construct and execute the Environmental Health Leadership Initiative (EHLI).  The ELHI program includes a leader-ship oriented curriculum that empowers school children to construct and lead projects addressing environmental health issues in their community.

The course will involve both taught curriculum and hands-on projects. The goal is to  train students to teach the curriculum to younger students, ultimately having the program be mostly student-run. Here is the structure of the Curriculum:

Curriculum A topics(6 classes + 1 class for final project presentations)

Class 1: Waste Management- Education

 Class 2: Waste Management- Critique/Solutions

Class 3: Water/Sanitation- Education

Class 4:  Water/Sanitation- Critique/Solutions

Class 5:  Hygiene- Education

Class 6: Hygiene- Critique/Solutions

Class 7: Final Projects

Curriculum B topics( 6 classes + 1 class for final project presentations)

Class 1: Pesticides- Education

 Class 2: Pesticides Critique/Solutions

Class 3: Air Pollution- Education

Class 4:  Air Pollution Critique/Solutions

Class 5:  Carcinogens- Education

Class 6: Carcinogens- Critique/Solutions

Class 7: Final Projects

In addition to the curriculum, there will be an annual competition in which children construct functional items out of recyclable waste found in their local community. Given a month to complete, the submission deadline will be at the end of September 2014. Finalists will be announced in November, and will be given 2 months to prepare a presentation at the culture show in late January. A winner and runner-up will be selected by a panel of judges and will be rewarded in late January.