Thursday, August 28, 2008

Nits & Lice

I know that its gross and disgusting and it sends chills down your spine when you hear about it, but hey according to Alghad Jordanian daily http://www.alghad.jo/?news=356152 more than half of our school children are infested with this pesky insect that invades the person's head and settles in there very comfortably until it gets properly treated with appropriate shampoo, combing, and eradication of the active nits that have great tendency of mutating time and again.

I'm not bringing up this topic to highlight the prevalence and pervasiveness of the problem, it is broad enough to speak for itself.

I'm writing to inform anybody who might be interested that there is a business opportunity that can be extracted out of this miserable situation, it may not be the most glamorous business opportunity but nonetheless it is worth exploring in more depth.

The ministry of education spends large sums of money every year on shampoo that they give to the schools for free, the schools in turn probably gives to the students to treat their heads. It is unknown whether the students use this medicated shampoo or they use other primitive archaic methods such as pouring kerosene on the head or something like that.

Irrespective of method they have been using it appears to be not working and more kids are getting more lice in their heads, more than half of all of the kids combined.

So for those of you that still have that die hard entrepreneurial sport, you can start lobbying the ministry of education to look at your business proposal which entails opening shops similar to the Barber shop in every Jordanian governed, the purpose of this lets call it lice eradication shop would service every school age child every year prior to entering the school grounds. In other words, the ministry of education would issue a decree, edict, or whatever you want to call it stating that no child will be admitted to the school yard until he/ she provide the principal with a certificate indicating that this person is totally and completely free of any lice. That he has been checked and either treated or found to be not needing any treatment and thus was given the certificate.

It would be something like the mandatory liability car insurance which dictates that no one will be granted permission to drive unless they can furnish a proof that they have at the very minimum a liability insurance that will protect the driver in the event of an accident.

I don't know how or why did I come up with this crazy idea, I'm not sure if my motive was to create another business idea for someone or to help those poor children to get their heads cleaned up from the nits and lice that not only bothers them to passes on the problem to other students that come in close contact with them.

Nits and Lice are no laughing matters, they aren't a disgraceful matter either, just because someone gets it doesn't mean that they aren't clean, there is a great deal of possibility that they got it from someone else and not from their own lack of good hygiene practice.

So there you have it go jump at it, I want to see a lice eradication shop approved by the ministry of education and funded by the same ministry opening in Amman, Salt, Irbid, Maan, Tafilah, Zarqa, Karak, Balqa, and somewhere in between.

The shops don't have to cater to school age children only even though they seem to be the ones that are in need of it the most, it can cater to adult and seniors and any age group that will need this type of service.

5 comments:

Mohanned said...

Hatem,
This might be an "inetersting" read for you

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=79231

Hatem Abunimeh said...

mohanned,

I have personally experienced all of the abuse mentioned in the report during the years of my studies in the public schools.

Hani Obaid said...

Wow half the kids ? I'm not allowing my young cousins into my room to play games on my PC this year!

mab3oos said...

Ramadan kareem!


Fawazeer @ mab3oos

Anonymous said...

Genial brief and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you for your information.