Sanitation realities from Stockholm Water Week - Wednesday 20 August 2008

Sometimes you can attend a World Water Week, or other such events, and although the topic is about people’s lack of the very basic needs, there is a distance between the nature of the event (delegates in their suits, the comfort of the auditorium, plentiful food and drink, oh and while we’re on the subject, palatial toilets) and the subject matter. This gulf was smashed in at least three different events - yesterday at the World Water Week brought us back to reality. And how.

In the gathering entitled The Joys of WASH in Schools a video showed the true nature of life for schoolchildren in a rural district of Kenya – latrines shared by over 100 boys and girls, the younger ones soiling themselves because they can’t wait long in a queue; students spooning water so dirty you wouldn’t clean your toilet with it leave alone drink it, from a fatally cavernous waterhole, toilets so filthy with shit and urine that you could smell them in the room...

Later, a side meeting concentrated upon South Asian sanitation and in particular picked out two big issues that we don’t look at enough, or perhaps at all.

No 1: There is a need to consider menstrual hygiene management in our work in sanitation, an average woman is menstruating for some 3,000 days in her life, it’s just a natural process. Fair enough, point taken. And the reality? A girl aged eleven in Bangladesh reused a sun dried rag which, unknown to her, had an insect in it; it entered her body and after a week of excruciating pain, she overcame her embarrassment and sought help. It was too late, the infection had got hold and she died.

And No 2: We need to support efforts to eradicate manual scavenging, it’s degrading in the extreme. Fair enough, point taken. And the reality? In India 1.3 million low caste clean out peoples’ shit from their latrines, septic tanks and clogged sewer pipes, with their bare hands. They are condemned to do this – their name marks them as scavengers and they can’t escape – “there is no promotion in this job”, Wilson Bezwada (of Safai Karmachari Andolan – the Manual Scavengers Movement) said, continuing “when someone asks you to clean their shit with your hands, I can’t tell you what that feels like... My parents did this, my brother and sister did it, when I was young they were so ashamed they didn’t even tell me”. Wilson did it but he doesn’t do it now. His movement aims to end this by the end of 2010; he wants us to let our local Indian embassy hear what you think about it. It is literally the least we can do.