Throughout my Peace Corps service in The Gambia, I have learned how important environmental sanitation is to community health. In my rural community, limited resources for waste management and sanitation create challenges that affect daily life. By living and working alongside community members, I have gained a deeper understanding of these challenges and have focused much of my health work on improving environmental sanitation through community cleanups, education and collaboration with local health workers.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the health sector, I observe a lot of different health issues in my community. When I started living in my village, one community need I quickly noticed was improvement in environmental sanitation, which essentially focuses on ways to control the different factors that affect a living space and its cleanliness. These different factors include waste management, pollution, water safety and food hygiene. In my community, I noticed that there was a lot of trash, waste and debris covering main walkways and the areas surrounding communal water pumps. The presence of this waste can negatively impact health, especially in spaces where a lot of people gather, such as at water pumps for fetching water daily.
