By Miyako Hamasaka | PR Manager
[Hygiene Education]
The New Year is a time for the JEN’s hygiene promotion team in the Za’atari camp to start a new project for children. Nearly 40% of the camp’s population are children under 11; our projects will provide them with psychosocial care as well as promoting good hygiene behaviour.
On 16 January 2014, JEN kicked off our hygiene promotion in 2014 with a monthly hygiene promotion event for children at the JEN’s tent in District 4. The key message of January 2014 is “personal hygiene.” Further to the key message of December 2013, “water conservation,” we stressed the importance of water by some ingenious activities: singing songs, a play by Syrian children, quiz contest, and poster contest under the theme of “What does water mean to you?” And of course, you can’t end a party without gifts! All children who attended the event received a hygiene pack containing toothbrush, toothpaste and soap. Through these activities for children, we have been working on hygiene promotion in the camp. JEN stuff is looking forward to the next event in February 2014—for sure, children are looking forward it too!
Our hygiene project has been carried out also for public schools in local communities outside of the camp. The JEN Amman office, which has provided assistance to Syrian refugees for over a year, is just about to finish all renovation works in 150 schools. One of the schools used to have only four latrine seats despite the large scale of over 1,000 boy students. JEN discussed with the Directorate of Education Engineer team and the headmaster and remodelled a storeroom into new latrines. In a mixed school where boy students and girl students used to use the same latrines, girls were hesitant to use the latrines as boys would be playing nearby. So we refurbished the dead space in the back to extend the latrines, then built a partition to separate them for boys and girls. Thus, the JEN engineering team renovates schools on a case-by-case basis, identifying what is required and what can be done. Relatively-young members’ passion for good-quality work can’t be overestimated. With increasing needs, we have not only planned to renovate water and sanitation facilities in another 50 schools, but also we have started building new classrooms to expand school capacities in order to accept Syrian students.
[Emergency Material Distribution]
15 March 2014 marked three years since the conflict in Syria broke out. JEN has started distributing clothes to new arrivals in the reception area of the Za’atari camp to meet the needs of refugees. Since 10 March 2014, we have distributed a bag filled with clothes donated by our partners to each newly arrived families. Because we are unable to conduct pre-survey on family size and structure among new refugees, we are required to instantly arrange each bag on their arrival. Thanks to seven distribution staff working 24/7 on a two-shift system, we assisted more than 800 individuals for the first three days. They were very glad to receive warm clothes in the middle of the night. This project couldn’t have done this smoothly without hard work of the warehouse team who carefully sorts and repacks donated clothes. The team has already prepared 40,000 individual sets since the beginning of January 2014! The number of refugees arriving in the Za’atari camp varies every day, but the JEN team is ready to welcome them with warm clothes any time.
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