Each DFAC (Dining Facility) here (and there are four of them) has an antechamber with about 15 sinks and lots of paper towels that all have the consistency of toilet paper. Everyone washes their hands before entering the DFAC to eat. Hand washing prior to meals is not normally that interesting, but in this case it is because there is no such room with sinks in any of the DFACs in the US that I have been to. I guess that you are expected to come to DFACs in the US with clean hands, whereas here, people may be coming from the field with dirty hands. So the sink room is something you only see here. Perhaps it is related to the dirt. And almost everyone entering the DFAC uses washes their hands - the soldiers, the TCNs (third country nationals from places like Nepal, Uganda, or Bangladesh), the locals, and the US civilian contractors. I have actually seen people make nasty remarks when people just walk in to the dining room without washing their hands (I witnessed this personally).
On a related note, though I don't like using the stuff, hand sanitizer is fairly ubiquitous. Wherever you go, every office, latrine, room, etc, has hand sanitizer. The USO put it in the little kits they gave us, it comes in care packages, they are attached to the latrines, and they are generally all about. I have a bottle on my desk. I got new bottles as part of a "flu kit" that just contained hand sanitizer and cheap tissues. It is quite normal for people to asent-mindedly use some while standing by a desk, in a meeting, outside, or wherever. I caught myself doing it yesterday. Actually, I think I have used so much hand sanitizer at this point that I can tell the difference between the different brands by the way my hands feel a few seconds after rubbing that stuff on them. Some brands leave your hand feeling refreshed in that alcohol wipe sort of way, others leave your hand feeling sticky, and others have moisturizer.
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