Every morning, like a silent, stolid army, the fisherman families and slum residents living on the beach in Chennai come down to the breakers to take their morning toilet run. A trove of squatters dots the landscape, some relieving themselves quickly and rushing off to work, some taking their time, staring out at the horizon like it’s a good bathroom reader. As I run along I dodge as many turd piles as trash scraps. It’s one way to get a rough gauge for the amount of diarrhea the community is suffering…
Jokes aside, the toilet situation here has got to be every public health official’s nightmare. Some stats*: lack of sanitation kills 1.8m people a year, diarrheal diseases kill five times as many developing world kids as AIDS, and disposing their feces safely would reduce the disease by 40%.
And here’s another issue: while seemingly all the men and most of the children (male and female) participate unashamedly in this ritual, the women are entirely absent. How do they do their business in the morning? According to my colleague Nithya, they run out to do it at 4am before everyone else wakes up. In addition to being a ridiculous manifestation of the gender discrimination of a common human activity (remember that book Everybody Poops?), this adds things like rape to the list of risks associated with open defecation.
The much-acclaimed World Toilet Organization is tackling some of these issues. It sees the “toilet taboo” as one of the biggest barriers to improving sanitation, and seeks to popularize the work of building and maintaining toilets for the 2.5bn people it estimates lack them, through such kitchy marketing campaigns as World Toilet Day and The Big Squat (both just celebrated yesterday). There’s also the World Toilet College for toilet design and maintenance capacity development, and the annual World Toilet Summit & Expo.
It seems to be working – they’ve gotten a ton of press and a number of avid followers – but these things take time. So far the “WTO” has 217 member organizations, a whopping 42 of which are in India, and yet it’s hard to see many tangible results. There’s also a social issue to consider – if you build it, will they come? How easy is it to convince people to change their morning pooping routines to using and preserving public toilets? How does one ensure they are convenient enough, clean enough and well-enough maintained? Should public facilities be provided free of cost, or will it all be pay-per-use and turn into a scenario reminiscent of Urinetown?
So many issues, so few solutions. Until then my neighboring slums will continue to use the ocean as their toilet-cum-garbage can, and I will continue to dodge the turds. Happy World Toilet Day!
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