The problem with poo
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 25/Nov/2010 11:34, 34 days ago
Last week I was invited to a three-day workshop on‘assainissement’ in communities at the Sous-Prefecture in Maga. It was a French word I didn’t know, and when I looked it up in my dictionary I was told it meant ‘the seasoning of food’. Although I was baffled I decided to go anyway, to discover that in this context ‘assainissement’ meant the ending of defecation in open spaces. This was timely; on top of its normal problems with water/defecation borne diseases Maga is currently in the grip of a cholera epidemic and there have already been over ninety cases in the Maga area, mainly in the fishing villages along the river. Community mapping to identify open defecation sitesAfter a day of training I set off to visit four targeted villages in a rickety bus, as part of an illustrious team of village elites including the police Commandant, the head of the health centre, the delegate for social affairs, and the local Pastor. When our team leader introduced me on our arrival in each community he would announce:“This is a white girl. Paul Biya (the President of Cameroon) sent to the government of America to ask that they sent her to help you. And here she is.”One of the first lessons we learnt was to refer to defecation by its most explicit name, to make people as ashamed as possible (caca in French, poo in English, or flei in Mousgoum). When we arrived in each village we would go to the house of the local chieftain and tell him we were there to talk about diseases and poo. Members of the community would then draw a map of their village in the earth, and used ash to mark out the areas where people defecated in the open (usually all alongallthe main roads!).On the 'poo tour' in the village of Ziam IIWe then went on the‘poo tour’ of the village, designed to make the community leaders as embarrassed as possible. All the local dignitaries would escort the sensitisation team round the village to examine the places with the most poo by the sides of the roads. On our return we’d get communities to do a calculation of how much poo the community produced. This is a basic maths problem: if one person produces 300g of poo each time they defecate, and on average people defecate twice a day, and there are about twelve people per household, and forty households in the village, and one lorry can carry ten tonnes ofrice, then how many lorries full of poo does one village produce in a day, a month and a year?“Where does all this poo go?” we’d ask. The community would reply that it was eaten by animals, stuck to the bottom of feet and shoes, got carried around by water, and picked up by flies. It was then time for the ‘bottle of water’ test. The lead facilitator would take a closed bottle of mineral water, open it, and drink. He’d then offer it to the chieftain and other members of the community, who’d drink as well. Then he picked up a miniscule amount of poo from the ground and dropped it into the bottle, before offering it round again. Obviously everyone recoiled in disgust. Our questions continued.“How many feet does a fly have?” “Six.”“What happens when a fly lands on your food?” “It vomits up whatever it ate last time it landed on something.”“So what happens when a fly lands on the poo that we just saw by the side of the road and then lands on your food?”The eventual aim of the exercise was to provoke someone from the village to announce that“we eat poo”. Whenever someone said this the facilitators got him to stand up in front of all the other villagers and repeat it in as many local languages as possible. It had the feel of a revelatory evangelical church meeting.At the end of the exercise the communities were asked to form an organising committee for the building of latrines. A competition has been launched between the ten target villages at Maga to see who can build the best latrines in the next three months. The winning village will not only get a party where local dignitaries will visit and the villagers will“Eat lots of food, drink lots of drink, and then shit in your new latrines”, but it will also get a sign and a banner saying ‘Defecation free village’. “A bit like Britain in bloom?” suggested my friend Ruth.If everyone in a community uses a well constructed closed latrine the incidence of water borne diseases can be reduced by up to 90%. An average family with eight children can spend 200,000CFA (much more than a parent paid teacher’s annual salary) a year on medical treatment for water borne diseases. Communities could save huge amounts of money by building latrines, which could then be invested in education, infrastructure, and farming. Of course, in Maga, nothing is too simple: because we live on a flood plain simple latrines would be flooded and destroyed every rainy season, so they will have to be built at far greater cost out of baked bricks and cement or old oil drums.At six thirty am on Sunday morning, my first day off for three weeks, my boss the Inspector rang me up.“So how was it?” he asked, “Do you think you saw enough poo?”