Going to the Loo: A Food Related Issue
A pregnant African woman is sitting in a pristine bathroom on a shining white toilet pedestal. ‘As a child growing up in Sudan, we never had toilets. We had to use pit latrines. Sometimes, in the evenings, we had to go to the nearest forest. You wipe yourself with the hot stones or leaves. You might use it even though it’s been used before! You can’t even afford to buy old newspapers to use them.’
Read more here.
This wakens memories for me of a school in Nigeria in the 1960s. We had a couple of concrete structures with benches with buckets beneath. The night soil man came round to empty them (god knows where, in retrospect) every day or so. Pretty up to date.
But there were never enough leaves to go around. The girls asked for their exam papers back but not (as I idealistically hoped) to review them but to use for toilet paper. When all else failed they backed up against the concrete and used that.
This is not an issue of not understanding cleanliness. These students found Europeans dirty for not going to the river to bathe twice a day. It’s an issue of how expensive some of the things we take for granted are.
And it’s a problem in so many places. I’m nervous of street food in Mexico. Yes, you can see the cooks and that’s an advantage over restaurants where you can’t. And yes, Mexicans at all social levels are meticulous about cleanliness. But the fact is that if you are tending a stall all day on a street corner there is nowhere to go to the loo, nowhere to wash your hands except in the bucket of water you brought with you.
So three cheers for public toilets. Three cheers for modern plumbing (though there are perhaps better systems that could have been chosen). And all power to those who are trying to bring these to more parts of the world.
