Let’s take a close look at… pooping.

 Tomorrow our project begins a week of training on a program called Community-Led Total Sanitation.  Appropriately named, this program deals with sanitation, but it deals with it different from most of the NGOs’ projects here. 

The typical program enters a village, gives materials or cash or both, and tells people to build latrines.  The project walks away happy that they can report to their donor that they have built X latrines (and thus renew their grant next year), and the villagers are happy that they have been given or even paid to make a small cement-floored building.  You would be surprised to hear the variety of creative uses villagers have made of their new latrines.  Some cover the toilet hole and raise chickens in them.  Others find they make great storage for hay or other goods that need to stay dry.  One man found his latrine just big enough to park his motorcycle in.  The most creative: sheep, crammed into a latrine.  Sure they could use them for their toileting duties, but some would reason that this will only make the place stink, and who would want to do that?!  Much better, they say, to relieve oneself in the field, under the cool night air and the starry sky (sounds nice doesn’t it?). 

Sanitation projects are not easy, because it takes much more than a cement pooping pad to get people to change the toileting habits they have held all their lives.  You might be thinking to yourself, “they need to be trained in the benefits of using a latrine.”  You are correct, but this type of training is extremely difficult, because people are often glad to verbally agree that their toileting practices need correction (because the more wealthy trainer tells them this), but unwilling to actually change (because, well, there’s a lot of reasons they may not change, more on that later).

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is an approach to sanitation that puts all the emphasis on advocacy.  To make that clear, the approach also pulls away all the handouts and stipends of materials for building a latrine.  The theory is: only a family/community motivated enough to invest and build their own latrine, will actually use a latrine. 

How does CLTS motivate people in such a way?  Simple, it shocks them, and it shames them, and it leaves the solutions up to them.  Examples?  The project staff ask the villagers to take them on a tour of the village.  When they see traces of open defecation they might ask the villagers, “how are you going to avoid eating that?”  They then explain the various ways that their own feces may end up back in their mouth: animals eating it and later being handled by food preparers, children running through it and bringing it into the house, flies being in it and then landing on their food.  This discussion is made blunt on purpose, to let communities know what kind of problem they’re dealing with. 

It gets worse.  Ready for this?  I have already heard that there is a “fly talk” that goes quite well in this part of the world.  The trainer asks the villagers for a cup of tea.  They dip a single piece of hair in the tea, then asks if anyone will drink the tea.  This seems to gross people out, so they all decline.  The trainer then asks how many legs a fly has, and explains that when a fly has been on feces, and then lands on their food, it is bringing 6 times the amount of feces to their food, as compared to that one piece of hair they were scared of.

Ready for worse yet?  In most places, there are other disgusting stories of the effects of poor sanitation, and the trainers that come in to a village look and listen for such stories, and then make a big public discussion of them.  The best stories I’ve heard:

-One trainer spots a chicken eating poop, and asks what the eggs have tasted like recently.

-Often trainers are taken as doctors, and people bring their sick to them.  On occasion a child will be brought with a parasite worm coming out of its nose or eye.  The trainer again makes the connection between worms and parasites of feces on the ground, and that thing they see coming out of the child’s face, in other words- how did that get there?

-In one place we heard about, a whole village complained of worms, and so a project gave worm medicine to everyone the same day.  In this place, the practice was to toilet on top of a clean rock.  When the urge to relieve one’s bowels hit the whole community at once, they covered a good portion of the fields around their village with their poo.  What happened next turned the whole village upside-down- a flock of game birds (that they often hunted and ate) flew in and descended on the fields, devouring the freshly laid worms.  Seeing this, many in the community were now vomiting.

In each of these places, the communities committed 100% to breaking the cycle of traces of feces making it back in their mouths.  They understood that it would take more than latrines, it would take a whole behavioral overhaul to rid them of the risks they were putting themselves in.  That is a real sanitation program!

All sick or silly stories aside, sanitation is a serious business.  It’s been almost 10 years since NGO started flooding into this country with various attempts to alleviate poverty and facilitate development.  One major focus has always been water and sanitation, and yet last year UNICEF reported that 257 of every 1000 children born in this country, was dead before age 5.  Diarrhea is a significant cause to that figure, last year 75,500 children died due to diarrhea.  Rapid latrine-building projects and ORS distributions have not curbed these figures, something more must be done.

And just in case you have some sick notion that God is showing his wrath to this people, let me remind you that our mandate is to spread the message of a God who created man in His image, who is in fact a God of life.  How will we do that, unless we care about the number of their babies that are dying?