Like a lot of the villages, Hilisaloo really needs toilets. (So to end the current practice of simply doing one’s business in the woods, whereupon flies return from the lightly buried poo piles to the villager food, causing disease, diarrhea, and death, among other such terrible things.) A toilet for every house with a septic system would be pretty costly (roughly 60 grand). So a better, and cheaper first step is to set up public toilets, in a form that people would like and use. So let’s go for it, right?!
Damo has been talking to them about what they might like and use. The big problem remains that their spring (and the water tank we built) is pretty far from the village center. If it were close, we could pump water from it into the toilets so that they flush. That aside (the spring and tank really are pretty far off), another option is to have a rain catch atop the toilets. But then there’d only be flushing when there had been enough rain. There’d be plenty of rain and plenty of flushing in the wet season. There’d even be rain and flushing pretty often in the dry season as well. But, in the dry season, which mind you roughly half the year, there’d also be perhaps longish spells in which there’d be little rain and little or no flushing action to speak of. Which, as you can imagine, would mean piled up poo, and a public health hazard all its own. Better, perhaps, to have poo piles decentralized, by being strewn about in the woods, as they are now.
So I got thinking of a different idea: naturally composting toilets that require no water at all! People around those parts–and in fact Damo himself–already compost pig poo, so the idea is familiar. So why not use those functions along side a rain catch, and so that the poo gets composted when the catch has run dry?! Good idea, right?!
Well, the trouble now is that you’ve then got a pretty big transportation problem: who is going to be assigned the job of moving piles of collective human poo from the toilet to the composting area? Will the kids wind up being asked to do it, raising a child labor problem all its own? Could some adults simply be paid to clean up? Would anyone take such a (shitty) job? Could we count on all involved to consistently check and follow through?
Hard to say. The task is disgusting. Transporting collective human poo is not a traditional or even familiar job. Â And would you want to do it? I sure wouldn’t — and I think I say that not just because I’m a spoiled advanced worlder, who takes such things for granted.
So there you go. We don’t have the answer yet. We’re working on it.
(On a more philosophical note, the question, to flush, or not to flush, seems harder and more profound than the question of whether to be, or not to be. Â Better to be, on balance, no?)