Wash hands and keep clean

Wash hands with clean water before food and after the latrine — the single habit that stops most sickness.

easy⏳ an hourtradition — not yet hand-tested

Most sickness in a camp or village does not come from the air. It comes from tiny germs — living things too small to see — riding from someone's body waste to someone's mouth. Their favourite vehicle is your hands. Break that ride, and you stop belly sickness, vomiting, and the diarrhea that kills more people in hard times than injuries do.

The fix costs almost nothing: wash your hands, at the right times, every time. One hour of setup makes it easy enough that everyone actually does it.

You need

• Clean water — boiled and cooled, or from a safe source. Dirty water can put germs back on clean hands.
• Soap, if you have any — soap pulls germs off skin far better than water alone. Any soap works: bar, liquid, even old slivers.
• Wood ash, if you have no soap — cooled white or grey ash from a fire, rubbed on wet hands, works as a rough soap. It is a proven stand-in, not a myth.
• A jug or bottle with a small hole or spout — so water can pour over your hands instead of sitting still in a bowl. Pouring water carries germs away; a shared bowl passes them around.
• A clean cloth or open air for drying — a dirty towel undoes the wash.

Steps

1. Set up a wash station where it will actually get used: one beside the latrine, one near where food is made.
   • Hang the jug from a branch or post at hand height.
   • The simplest version: poke a small hole low in a hanging bottle, plug it with a stick, pull the stick to wash. This is called a tippy-tap.
   • Keep the soap or ash right there, on a string or in a small dish with drain holes.
2. Wet both hands with the pouring water.
3. Rub soap or ash over every surface for about 20 seconds — count slowly to twenty, or sing one short verse twice.
   • Backs of hands, between fingers, thumbs, wrists, and under the nails. Nails hide the most.
4. Rinse under pouring water until all the lather is gone.
5. Let hands air-dry, or use a cloth that is clean and dry. Shake, don't wipe on your trousers.
6. Wash at the always-times, no exceptions:
   • After using the latrine, or helping a child or sick person use it.
   • Before cooking, before eating, before feeding anyone.
   • After touching raw meat, animals, animal waste, or a wound.
   • After caring for anyone who is sick.
7. Extend the habit beyond hands, a little at a time:
   • Trim fingernails short once a week.
   • Wash cooking pots and eating bowls with hot water and let them dry in the sun — sunlight helps kill germs.
   • Wash your body and clothes when you can; every few days is enough if water is short.

Watch out

• A shared bowl of still water is a germ soup. Everyone who dips adds their germs. Always pour water over hands instead.
• No soap is not a reason to skip washing. Scrubbing hard with water plus ash, or even clean sand, removes far more germs than nothing. Do the best available, every time.
• Wet cloths that never dry grow germs. Swap drying cloths daily and dry them in full sun. When in doubt, air-dry hands.
• Hot ash burns. Only use ash that is fully cold. If ash stings broken skin, rinse it off well and use extra water and scrubbing instead.
• Clean hands, dirty last rinse. If the final rinse water is river water or other unsafe water, germs go straight back on. Keep the wash station filled with safe water.
• The habit fails quietly. Nobody notices a skipped wash — until half the camp has diarrhea a few days later. Put the station where people can't miss it, and let children remind adults. It works.

How it works

Gut germs leave one person in their waste, hitch onto hands, then transfer to food, cups, and other hands, and finally reach a new mouth. Doctors call this the fecal–oral route — the gut loop. Soap and ash break up the oily film on your skin that germs cling to; rubbing lifts them free; running water carries them away. Twenty seconds of scrubbing removes most of them — enough to break the loop.