On September 11 this year a team from Feedback Foundation, a Yatra partner, came to the village and began to work with the villagers to change behavior. Their tools were basic social emotions: disgust, shame and pride. First the villagers were asked to draw a map of the village and to point out where each householder went to defecate. The amount of excrement lying around was totted up—it always adds up to metric tons. And then the realization came: flies fly from this excrement to food, and everyone was eating poop. As long as one family continued to defecate outside, everyone could be contaminated. That is the disgust and the shame. Those are the triggers. They entice behavior modification just as children are enticed through the doors of the Yatra by glow germs and poo minefields. Immediately, although villagers had defecated outside since time began, toilets began to be built. They cost anything from nothing to very little. Some were just dry pits with a simple grass superstructure, but they are a beginning.
The sarpanch—village leader—leads me round the village with great pride. He introduces the village monitoring team, young lads who get up daily at 3:30 A.M. to patrol the streets for open defecators and try to persuade them verbally: "It's easy to build a toilet, so why don't you? You are spending more on medical bills than a toilet would cost." In other villages children do this patrolling, banging pans when they find a defecating sinner, or giving them shame garlands of leaves. The methods differ but the truth they are based on does not: Open defecation becomes a community sin.
Three months on 95 percent of households have toilets, and they are clean and fly-free. At the end of the visit the sarpanch addresses a group of schoolchildren. He says, "Look at these visitors from abroad who have come to see us because of what we have stopped doing. What have we stopped doing?"
The children chorus: "Eating poop!"
They have also stopped dying from it. Six months ago—before the latest visitors came—the villagers Kalawti Devi and Sadina Khatan died of cholera. The sarpanch writes down "10 small sons" when I ask him for the names of villagers who have died from diarrhea. Ten other small sons will no longer die of filth. On World Toilet Day, that is something to celebrate.
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16 Comments
Add CommentThere was a design of decent out houses available for many years it had screen covered vents and lids to prevent flies. It worked very well for many many years required no utility's and protected one from weather. When the pit filled a new pit was dug and the slab with the out house was dragged over the new pit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find it interesting that what I had thought obvious was that a civilization would quickly evolve to burying the feces. Seems so obvious, but most other animals don't. I guess the human animal didn't evolve the behavior over time either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLarryW...Interesting point. I wonder if there was a time in the past where they were buried to hide your location from a predator. Maybe in the last +50k years after we became the predator, we lost the motivation/need...Just a thought...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn further thought, probably not. If I remember right, chimps actually throw it at enemies.
Deut. 23:14 Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Diesel67...no idea what your referring to. Are you saying that the people that shit outside don't believe in god? Or are you saying that it was a social mantra as the article suggest? Just wondering....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCultural lag is more pronounced in a very large population. Education is still the principal impasse
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistoward a cleaner lifestyle. Just show and tell does
not impart a strong enough stimulus without a broader
understanding of germ theory, disease spread and so on.
We tend to overlook that in our haste to bring modernity to all the worlds people.
What is so ironic is that the laws of natural selection and the continuation of dreadful and fatal habits and activities has for eternity been the conduit to limit certain rules of nature, i.e., runaway population and destruction of the planet. It is this which man in his humanity because of the horrors known and the suffering resulting from not only unsanitary and unsafe living conditions and practices and the concern and sympathy for the welfare of members of our tribe, no matter how remote and far flung they may be, have taken to make life more bearable for those for all the various reasons are unaware of the consequences they place themselves in to their peril.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm sure even the extremely marginalized would, had they the education, desire a better way of life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have a point with respect to nature's efforts, however harsh, to control population. Over a billion
people living from 80-100 yrs of age might prove disastrous.
Seriously none of you commenting picked up on the bad games the supposed Wash organization is using to teach poor people to be "clean!" Get Real people! "Leaders organize interactive games such as Poo Minefield, where a blindfolded contestant must avoid the piles of excreta and pick up soap bars." Seriously, an educated person would never find it "clean" to blind someone and then have that person walk through excreta! The article also stated "a single gram of feces can carry 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. These hazards can be carried back on feet and fingers into food and water. Uncovered waste kills more children annually than HIV/AIDS, TB and measles combined." ANYONE THAT IS INTELLIGENT AND OF SOUND-MIND WOULD NEVER PROMOTE, SET A PERSON UP, OR WATCH IN "FUN" SOMEONE FALLING IN A GROUND OF VIRUSES, BACTERIA, PARASITES, DISEASE, ETC.!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe as a human society should be looking into the WASH organization and asking why they think setting up a person to become diseased is a "clean" idea. Here in the United States and other countries there are laws put in place to keep people from purposely harming other people. WHERE IS THE UNITED NATIONS AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS TO STOP THESE ILL-ADVISED AND ULTIMATELY HARMFUL "GAMES?"
Umm...I think that they use plastic models. That seems to be the most likely scenario.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHas all the cleanliness of USA stopped "Various types f Cancers ???" Why not ??? Where is the catch ??? Those people who do not know how to clean the "ASS" after defication, how can they teach us lessons of cleanliness. We Indians use ' Water" and not "Paper' to do it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi Sensibility. Thank you for showing interest in the subject and for speaking your mind on the subject..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, I believe that you have a completely wrong idea in mind of the games at the Great WASH Yatra. We would of course never put someone in contact with excrements for fun.
here's an image of the game: http://bit.ly/poominefield
I suggest that you have a look at the diary on WASH United's website on www.wash-united.org, or on http://www.nirmalbharatyatra.org/gallery to the see games in images (and described).
Very refreshing info - thanks a lot! The majority tends to forget: its not about health, nor about bacteria count per shit pile... Its about survival of a civilization. Believe me, given the same conditions they will survive (as they do now) and you won't - for your bacteria count is too low :(( I have seen kids growing up together with chicken - practically swiping chicken shit over their faces. Pretty healthy kids they were! Please worry for yourself: the cleaner - the worse. We do need provocation: we become more fit :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery refreshing info - thanks a lot! The majority tends to forget: its not about health, nor about bacteria count per shit pile... Its about survival of a civilization. Believe me, given the same conditions they will survive (as they do now) and you won't - for your bacteria count is too low :(( I have seen kids growing up together with chicken - practically swiping chicken shit over their faces. Pretty healthy kids they were! Please worry for yourself: the cleaner - the worse. We do need provocation: we become more fit :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSensibility be sensible, it's a game, they are not actually walking around or throwing real poo. It's also not a real mine field either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSemansys...One of the primary reasons to not "go" in the open is to prevent the spread of disease and parasites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisexample: Cholera..3-5 million infected every year with +100k deaths.