www.tippytap.org

Celebrity Tippy Tapper Anna Hazare!

admin — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 12:41:16 +0000

Anna Hazare, an Indian social activist first recognized for the transformation of his village (Ralegaon Siddhi) using watershed management, is in the news! He started a fast unto death to pressure the Indian government to pass a tough anti corruption bill especially geared to stop corruption in public offices. The fast led to rallies and protests supporting the passage of the bill across the country. Hazare broke his fast today – just after the Government of India agreed to his demands and the passage of the bill. To celebrate, here is a picture of Anna Hazare washing his hands using a tippy tap!

The picture is from January 2010 at Ralegaon Siddhi. We built a tippy tap for our personal use near the latrines. When he saw the tippy tap, he called it “crazy”. He then followed up by saying “The world needs more of this kind of crazy.” Our thoughts exactly.

Happy World Water Day?

admin — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:25:48 +0000

I’ve been online for the last hour trying to find inspiration to write this post which is a day late as it is. Since we work in watsan, it seems like it shouldn’t that hard to write about something that we eat, sleep and breathe (and drink and hand wash with). But I struggle sometimes with this notion of World Water Day.

I love the idea of millions around the world tweeting, texting, facebooking, posting, youtubing, Digging, stumble-uponning, gum-chewing, nose-picking, hair-scratching and generally just bad-grammaring about World Water Day. There’s something beautiful about the idea of solidarity, I suppose when someone with running water 24 hours a day thinks about someone who doesn’t have water. But I can’t shake my sadness that we need a day for this at all. World Water Day, really? It’s like having a day for air or something else that we all need – how ridiculous. Of course, when I did look this up, it turns out that there is a Clean Air Day, a Spare the Air Day and a Clean Indoor Air Day (aka No Tobacco Day). There goes that point.

In an effort to clear my head, I decided to sort through thousand or so pictures on our camera…and stumbled upon these:

Main village canal where villagers bathe and wash their clothes and dishes.

School hand pump

The pictures are from various water and sanitation projects we have worked on. The ones above are from a Bengali refugee camp called RH3 in Karnataka, India. The picture on the right is from Deou in northern Burkina Faso in West Africa.

Kids pulling up turbid water from hand dug well

I feel a little sheepish that I spent time surfing the virtual world for this post when I clearly needed to be targeting my focus on the realities on the ground. The reason this day strikes me as odd is because it’s Water Day EVERY DAY for many in the world. The women and children in Deou spend up to 24 hours in a relay race of sorts to provide 2 jerry cans of water of dubious quality for their family every day. My kids (as I refer to the dozens of children who adopted me during my work in RH3) literally consume shit in their drinking water. And I really don’t have to go as far as this to see dramatic water struggles. Almost every single villager we work with here lists water as their first and foremost problem.

I’ve been behind a computer for 18 hours a day for 3 weeks now. It is not a typical schedule for us, but it turns out that you need to do this if you’re trying to create a website from scratch with no web design background. While we’re excited about the win of the video and the launch of tippytap.org, it’s important to keep what’s important close to us. Our challenge lies in linking the splash of the video win and all these virtual victories to an actual improvement for the communities that we serve. Wish us luck.

And for those of you that are interested (and read this far), Canada celebrates National Clean Air Day on June 8th.

We won!

admin — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 03:25:16 +0000

We won! Our tippy tap video entitled “It’s in Your Hands” is one of 4 winners in youtube’s do-gooder nonprofit contest. And that’s out of 1350 videos.

It’s funny how life works out. Andrew Hinton is based in the UK. We work in Panchgani. Andrew had never heard of tippy taps. And we had never heard of Andrew. An ‘Initiatives of Change’ video assignment brought him to Asia Plateau in Panchgani where he stumbled across our Grampari tippy tap here during a stroll after tea. And thus, the tippy tap video was born.

Another happy coincidence (aka watching the sloth video) meant that we ran across the youtube video contest. “This will be fun,” we thought, “but we won’t actually win”. That didn’t stop us from relentlessly spamming our friends though. And then we won (and have managed to retain most of our friendships too….)

Which brings us to this website. We believe in tippy taps. More than the technology though, we believe in the kind of thinking that recognizes tippy taps, a really small and simple thing, could be the solution to a really big problem. 3.5 million children dying every year –could you ask for a bigger problem? And hand washing with soap – could you think of a simpler solution? It’s literally in your hands.

Clichés aside though, promotion of this life saving practice is not as easy as you might think. Behavior change in general is a tricky business. People don’t wash their hands for a variety of reasons. Which means that you first have to identify what these reasons are. And then overcome these barriers with a variety of tools. We’ve created this website as a forum for all things tippy tap and hand washing and as a resource to improve public health through the promotion of hand washing with soap. Basically, what we wish we had when started out on this journey. So come join us. Send us your pictures, stories, designs, puns, limericks etc. It’s in your hands now….