Neighborhood Clean-Up

Twenty minutes before I left the house this morning, my co-teacher Warangkana called to tell me that today was neighborhood cleanup day in one of the villages that feeds our school. Good thing we didn’t have important lesson plans! I rode my bicycle over and met up with the students – grades 3 and 6 – across the river, where they were filling bags of trash.

A major goal of the neighborhood cleanup, which takes place in all villages in our area at the start of every rainy season, is to prevent an outbreak of dengue fever. Dengue is spread by daytime-biting mosquitoes who like to lay eggs in standing water. The students, together with the teachers and a group of local health volunteers, distribute little packets of "mosquito sand" * to the people in the village and help put the mosquito sand in the various buckets of water that stand around the houses. I think they also try to discourage people from keeping buckets of standing water in the first place.

I was excited to get to be part of this activity for several reasons. One, I always like to go deeper into the neighborhoods where my students live and see what things are like. I got to see several of their houses today as well, which I’ll describe more in a later blog. Two, I think it’s pretty cool that the school teams up with the hospital to do community outreach in the village. That’s a great example of working together. And three, I really don’t want to get dengue fever. It’s not one of "those" diseases "over there" – you can really get it here! Three volunteers have gotten it since we arrived in Thailand, and all of them described it afterwards as pretty awful. So despite the fact that I was sweltering in the heat and had sweat dripping down my back all morning, I was having a good time.

* "Mosquito sand" is not an official term. It’s what the 6th grade came up with in English class to describe what they had been doing. I assume the substance is some sort of pesticide. My co-teacher said that it would make us sick if we ate it, but it doesn’t kill mosquitoes – it just stops them from laying eggs in the water. The only words in English on the back of the packet are a brand name "ABATE," and the ingredients tetramethyl and thiodiphenylene bis (phosphorothioate). Not being much of a scientist, I can’t explain those, but maybe someone else can? The close-up photo of the boys shows one of them, Giangsak, holding up a packet.