August 27, 2016
“Since 2005, the world has been in the grip of the decade of Water For All. There have been high-profile water-related conferences in abundance, though sanitation is always an afterthought, if it’s considered at all. ”
August 27, 2016
“The British Toilet Association set up a successful Loo of the Year competition (successful enough that winners’ revenue allegedly doubles), but its members came from the plumbing industry and weren’t desperate to solve the world’s sanitation problems. There was no global, organized association campaigning to improve the world’s rotten sanitation state. Jack Sim thought the planet needed one. In 1999, he founded the World Toilet Organization. He knew what he wanted it to be: a support network for all existing organizations. It wouldn’t charge membership fees. It would be, in his words, “a servant, not a leader.”
August 27, 2016
“One lesson that Sim learned was about language. Viravaidya tailored his message to his audience. He held condom-blowing contests with schoolchildren, and talked profit and loss with businessmen (his punchline was “Dead customers can’t buy anything”). “He’s not talking to them about high morals or anything like that,” Sim tells me with admiration. “He’s talking to them in a way they like to hear.” Partly thanks to Mr. Condom’s efforts, new HIV infections in Thailand decreased by a staggering 87 percent.”
August 27, 2016
“Sim came away from meeting Viravaidya having learned that anything could be made talkable. Also, “You have to laugh at yourself first, because people are going to laugh. But after they laugh at you, they will listen. If I hadn’t been taught that, I would never have gone any further than a couple of months.”
August 27, 2016
“WTO events can produce a colorful cast list. There may be a Russian professor of hydraulics who appears at a breakfast meeting with a can of beer in his pocket. There is usually a delegation of Chinese who give short presentations and are not seen again because, according to other delegates, “They only come for the shopping.” There are always things to learn. During breaks, I find out that Australian automatic toilet operators use the terms Code Red (for cleaning incidents involving blood) and Code Brown (for the obvious). The Australian automatic toilet operator who tells me this is Scott Chapman, whom I meet in the first-floor cafe.”
August 27, 2016
“the WTO has set up a World Toilet College in Singapore. There are plans for a Peace Prize for Sanitation, a rock concert in China, and for a Toilet Development Bank that would give $100 low-interest loans to encourage poor people to build latrines. Over the months, I get emails informing me of yet another of Jack’s projects, and though he is a showman, they generally come true, because he’s a networker. On the WTO Web site, the organization’s logo—a blue toilet seat—is now featured alongside the familiar blue laurel wreath of the UN because the WTO is beginning to be given proper weight by the development establishment. Plans are being made to set up a Global Sanitation Bond, a finance mechanism meant to improve on existing ways of getting money from rich countries to poor ones.”
August 27, 2016
“We can get celebrities to talk about water,” a WaterAid employee tells me. “But none of them want to be pictured on a toilet.” ”
August 27, 2016
“People with decent sanitation have fewer diseases and take fewer days off work; they don’t have to pay for funerals of their children dead from cholera or dysentery. They save on medicines, and the state saves because it’s not providing expensive hospital care. Every dollar invested in sanitation brings an average $7 return in health costs averted and productivity gained. That simple number is the result of years of complex calculation of variables by development economists. ”
August 27, 2016
“ But soldiers know about sanitation because they have to. Shit can win and lose wars. Accounts of the Battle of Agincourt describe half the English archers fighting while naked below the waist, because dysentery was ravaging their troops so. (This led Voltaire to conclude that England had “taken victory with its pants down.”) During the First World War, France’s general staff ordained that latrines be painted light blue because this was the color that flies liked least. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong laid thousands of sharpened wooden stakes topped with excrement—pungi—and caused thousands of casualties (the stick only pierces the boot and foot; the excreta is deadly).
So Kasrils didn’t have trouble seeing the connection. He joked that when he was a guerrilla, he had known the rivers and forests of the whole region. He said, “I’m going from fire to water.”
August 28, 2016
“There are endless ways to build a pit latrine well and endless ways to build them badly. Millions of the people who count in statistics as having access to adequate sanitation actually have a dark and stinking fly-infested box. The VIP innovated with an offset pit that could hold an interior vent pipe, a screen on the pipe to keep out flies, and a semi-dark interior to achieve the same effect. It was definitely ventilated, and definitely improved: a three-month experiment in 1975 found that 179 flies a day were caught in a latrine without a vent pipe, while the daily fly toll in a VIP was two. (If flies can’t get into the latrine, they also can’t emerge from it with feces-covered feet, ready to infect nearby food.)”
August 28, 2016
“In the real-life South African version of this tale, Kasrils duly went into the toilet under the gaze of a crowd of serious onlookers. He shut the door, pretended to use it, and came back out, whereupon the entire crowd began singing the South African national anthem. “And the VIP had been painted in national colors, of course,” he adds. It’s a great story, and I’ve enjoyed the show, because Kasrils is another great persuader. It’s a shame Jack Sim came to toilets after Kasrils had left them, because they would get on.”
August 28, 2016
“One day Mulaudzi was driving as usual through the gold-mining areas north of Johannesburg. He worked then as a geologist for Anglo-American, an enormous mining company whose salary provided him with a large house, two cars, and a pleasant lifestyle. As he drove, he saw a group of children on the street. High school age. “I stopped them and said, ‘Please go back to school.’ The children were amazed, and said they could not go back to school because they were looking for a toilet.” Now it was Trevor’s turn to be astonished. “There’s no toilet in your school?” and he went to have a look, marching into the high school gates and to the ablution block, handily—for an interloper’s purposes—set apart from the school buildings. The toilets were a disgrace. “Shit everywhere! Shit piled up behind the door! Filthy! There were no doors on the stalls. There was even poo in the hand-basins.” He finally understood, he says, “why our children hate going to school. It starts in the toilet.”
The headmaster then received a visit from a strange man who told him his school toilets were disgusting. “He was astonished. Then he said, ‘But the children are unruly. They do not clean.’” Okay, said Trevor, “I will do it for you.” Then, wearing a suit and tie, he found a wheelbarrow and a shovel and set about cleaning the block with children and teachers looking on at “this madman who is cleaning our toilets.” He says, “It was an amazing feeling.” So amazing that he went home, quit his job and nice lifestyle, and the next day set up a cleaning company whose mission was to ensure that South Africa’s schoolchildren had clean toilets.
That’s the tale. I hear it several times over the course[…]”
August 30, 2016
“On my penultimate day in South Africa, Trevor and I fly to Cape Town brain-squeezingly early on Kulula, yet another cheery low-cost airline. I don’t know who decided that low-cost airlines had to try to be funny, but they did and they do. The flight attendant says, “We have landed in Cape Town. If that’s not where you want to be, that’s your problem.”
Notes From: Rose George. “The Big Necessity.” iBooks.
