Cambodia Handwashing Project on the 116th Global Voyage

Peace Boat cooperated with LUSH Japan to deliver soap to a primary school in the village of Sna Phae in Cambodia, where we have also supported the removal of landmines. This is part of a project to support children’s health by building the habit of washing hands with soap. This report shares about the visit by participants of Peace Boat’s 116th Global Voyage to the school.

Delivering soap and interacting with schoolchildren

On March 21, 2024, 25 participants from Peace Boat’s 116th Voyage, accompanied by staff members, visited the Peace Boat Sna Phae Primary School as part of the overland tour to learn about the ongoing issues of landmines in Cambodia. 200 students of the school greeted our group as we arrived. This school was built in 2016, after the area had been cleared of landmines in 2015 with the help of donations collected through the Peace Boat Landmine Abolition Campaign (P-MAC).

The tour participants from Peace Boat worked together and were able to hand over 100 soap that they brought to the school. This was followed by a programme of cultural exchange and joint activities between the Peace Boat participants and children, including learning the Khmer language and playing games like football, origami and hand games.

Handwashing habits strengthening since the COVID pandemic

The “Cambodia Handwashing Project'' started in 2017. Twice every year, Peace Boat delivered soap to the primary school, and conducted workshops to teach the children how to wash their hands correctly. The school’s teachers are also regularly conducting such education for children, and through these processes the habit has become more strongly ingrained. As a result, the health of the children improved and the importance of washing hands was relayed from the children to the adults.

After December 2019, it was for some time not possible to deliver soap to the school due to the COVID pandemic.Yet throughout this period, the teachers continued to teach the children how to wash hands. The village of Sna Phae does not have running water. When we visited in 2019, the well at the primary school was broken, leading to insufficient supplies of clean water and making handwashing difficult. Now, the school has built a new well within its grounds. While there are times when this new well cannot provide a lot of water, it can be continually used, together with efforts to conserve water. This is not yet an ideal environment, yet efforts to protect the health of the children arecontinuing steadily. Peace Boat will continue to cooperate with the teachers of the school and LUSH in order to continue this project.