The final instalment (probably) and what Anna has actually been doing when not on holiday

Contrary to popular belief, we’ve not just been holidaying during our time in Thailand. Now, as I’m about to leave I thought I’d summarise what I’ve actually been doing in Mae Sot.

My work has covered two main areas:

1 – Water and sanitation for Burmese migrant schools

2 – Training for Community Based Organisations (CBOs)



Planning to construct three more toilets at this migrant school



My team is focussing work on 10 of the migrant schools around Mae Sot. Almost everyone else is a medical or health person, but I have been working with the Environmental Health (EH) officer of the team (i.e. the guy in charge of doing water and sanitation stuff). I began by doing an assessment of the current water and sanitation at each of these 10 schools and we’ve decided to provide new toilets and/or handwashing stands at five of these.

Yuck!

All the schools rely completely on donor funds and there’s such a difference between the facilities at some of the schools who, mostly around Mae Sot town, have good funding sources, new school buildings and high tech water treatment, to those who, more commonly further away from town, may just have one working toilet for over 100 students...

Part of the training I’ve done is on ‘Initial Environmental Examination’ (IEE) which is a recent donor requirement and caused water and sanitation work to be put on hold in the migrant schools since August last year. I’ve run training on how an IEE can be done and worked with the EH officer so they that we have completed IEEs for each of the five schools we plan to work with. Just waiting on the Bangkok office to approve it all now before work can be started...



I’ve done training to some medical organisations, known as CBOs (it basically means that they were set up by people from Burma, not international organisations). It’s quite likely that their roots are from political movements and apparently whenever there’s trouble in Eastern Burma, the newspapers there blame the CBOs in Mae Sot for stirring up trouble, but I’m not sure how accurate that is... My training has been on IEEs for medics in case they are involved with providing water supplies and toilets and also it’s about medical waste disposal and issues about insecticide treated bed nets for mosquitoes. I’ll be repeating it on Monday for another group, together with half a day on water and sanitation for disasters and emergency responses.

A well with some problems... can you spot all 10? (Part of a Sanitary Survey for monitoring wells)

Biohazard symbol for medical waste

I’ve also put together training material on medical waste disposal at the main clinic for migrants and a couple of modules for part of a two year training programme for medics on water and sanitation and emergencies. Although I won’t be here when they cover these topics, I’ll be explaining it all to someone else so hopefully they will be able to use my materials to run the courses. Topics include: hydrology, water supply, water safety plans, sanitation and infection control, toilet design, how to make ‘tippy taps’, waste disposal (including medical waste), sustainability, emergency response and disaster risk reduction.



A small slow sand filter at one of the migrant schools

 Other bits and pieces have included:

Designing slow sand filters for drinking water. However, this has been put on hold as none of the ten schools assessed seemed to need it. Although there are others that do, many of the health team are involved with the refugee influxes along the border from the fighting in Burma so it’s been decided not to expand work to additional schools at the moment;

 Assistance for pipe network analysis for refugee camps – I had planned for spend a couple of months working in a couple of the refugee camps so had started work on this, but as my plans have changed and I’ll be returning to the UK earlier this will not happen.

Exposure to refugee influxes and consequent issues, including visiting the main holding centre for 15,000 refugees who crossed the border when fighting first broke out after the 2010 elections

Attending health training for Community Health Volunteers in one of the migrant villages

Attending a community cleaning day (and no, that does not mean I just cleaned our house).

Getting ready for some seious cleaning

So there you go. It’s been a bit slow at times but hopefully some of the work I’ve done has been useful J