Essential for maintaining health, hand washing is a skill that needs to be learned and ingrained in childhood and Bestbuy Maldives, in conjunction with Lifebuoy and Maldives Red Crescent Society, recently celebrated Global Hand Washing Day for the 7th consecutive year.
The main focus of the Global Handwashing Day is to raise awareness in the Maldivian community, especially the children and parents, about the importance of hand washing, not only with water, but also with soap. Every year 2 million children worldwide die before their 5th birthday – these deaths could be prevented with proper hand washing.
School focus
To start the 2017 Global Hand Washing event Bestbuy Maldives selected six schools in which they dressed the hand washing area with Lifebuoy soap products. Education boards showing the correct hand washing technique were placed in the toilets and near the hand washing areas. Red Crescent volunteers, along with Bestbuy Maldives representatives helped the children make hand prints on Lifebuoy pledge boards, the children used four different colours of paint to represent four different types of germs. Then, after watching a demonstration of effective hand washing technique, the children washed their colourful hands with Lifebuoy soap until all traces of ‘germs’ (paint!) was removed.
Global Hand Washing Day 2017 – celebrated on 4th November
This public event, held at the Artificial Beach from 4-6 pm, was packed with fun filled activities for children as well as a live performance by famous local singer, Mr. Shalabee and his band. Main objective of the event was to create awareness among children and, importantly, their parents about the importance of washing hands with soap five times a day. Families enjoyed face painting, bowling and darts games, a bouncy castle and cartoon mascots. A huge cake decorated with ‘Lifebuoy Global HandWashing Day’ was cut and shared with all who participated in the celebrations.
Bestbuy Maldives would like to thank everyone who came along and helped make the event a success, the staff of BBM and the volunteers from Maldives Red Crescent Society. Everyone involved has helped to bring the importance of effective hand washing to the forefront of the minds of families and children of the Maldives.
Effective hand washing saves lives.
