rice poo, potato poo

This year I´m throwing all my weight behind a big latrine project. Sanitary latrines are a critical piece in solving a lot of health problems in rural, underdeveloped communities like the villages around Chalaco. Obviously, they take care of the human waste issue, but maybe not so obvious are the related benefits, like reducing childhood malnutrition and animal disease. Regarding the former issue, the official statistic in Chalaco´s 50 villages is a jarring 41%, which is over twice the national average. While some of this is due to a poor diet consisting mostly of potatoes, rice, and fresh cheese, in large part it can be attributed to open-air defecation and poor hygiene habits, which combine to create an environment friendly to bacteria like E. Coli and parasites like Giardia and pinworms, which are transported via dirt, food, and untreated water. It goes without saying that when the worm in your belly is eating half your food, your growth will slow and you won´t have the energy needed to study or work. As far as animal disease, one example is the Cysticercosis which free-roaming pigs can pick up from ingesting raw human waste. The eggs of this parasite embed themselves in the pigs´ flesh, which is then consumed by humans, allowing the cysts to hatch into tapeworms, which can then make it all the way to the brain and cause adult-onset epilepsy. Fun stuff, eh? So by building latrines, the idea is that we´re targeting a whole bunch of health issues and also creating a certain level of hygiene-consciousness in the population. The project also includes certain “healthy households” commitments on the part of each participating family, including a small vegetable garden, a micro-landfill for inorganic trash, a pen for pigs and chickens, and attendance at training sessions throughout the year. They´re also contributing all the local materials, 500 adobes for the structure, and several days of labor each.

In this case the term “latrine” isn´t exactly accurate. The standard “pit” latrine, long promoted by Peace Corps, the UN and WHO, and many an NGO, consists of a two-meter-deep hole in the ground covered with a concrete slab with a hole in the middle for squatting, a hut made of local materials, and a ventilation tube to release the gases produced. There are many variations on the design, but the basic scheme is that little by little the hole fills up with waste, until it is filled in at the top and the whole unit moved to a new spot. While this design does address the human waste issue, there are many drawbacks. First of all, it stinks. Due to the mixing of liquid and solid waste in the pit, the decomposition process is anaerobic, which produces the awful smells generally associated with latrines. And while the smell is unpleasant to humans, it has the opposite effect on flies (another vector for food contamination). It´s also a less-than-sustainable solution, because the whole unit must be moved every few years (theoretically the hut and concrete slab can be dismantled and moved, but this requires manpower and the delicacy to not break them in the process). Third, and maybe most important where I live, when it rains for four months a year, anything below the surface tends to fill up with water, latrine pits included. For these reasons and a few more explained below, my work counterparts and I, along with the sixty participating families in the village of Naranjo, decided to go with a much more interesting design: the eco bathroom.

Essentially, the eco bathroom turns your poop into rich, usable compost for your veggies. Sound weird to you? Try explaining it to a roomful of mostly elementary-educated subsistence farmers, many of whom still don´t have electricity or running water. The design, which originated in Botswana and has spread all over the world, consists of two above-ground brick chambers covered with a concrete slab, and a specialized toilet seat which separates the solid waste from the liquid. Ironically, this bathroom will be the sturdiest structure most families have, their homes being made of mud bricks. So, if we ever get an earthquake or tornado here, if nothing else the families will have a nice place to duck for cover. In any case, once one chamber is full of a mixture of solid human waste, ash, and other organic material like cow and horse dung (about a year for an average family), it is sealed and the family switches to the other side. After the second year, chamber 2 is sealed, the now fully-decomposed compost is removed from chamber 1, and the process begins once again. The urine is piped to a 5-gallon container, where it can be mixed with water, soap, tobacco, ají peppers, and other ingredients to make a variety of plant fertilizers and insecticides.

The benefits of the eco bathroom are multiple. In the first place, these bathrooms use no water, leaving more for consumption and domestic use. You really need to live in a place where people – sometimes literally – go to war over water, to understand how crucial this is. Eco bathrooms don´t fill up with rainwater, and they emit no foul odors thanks to the dry (aerobic) decomposition process. Finally, rather than simply filling up after a few years as pit latrines do, eco bathrooms operate in a yearly cycle of filling and emptying, with a lifespan of up to 50 years with proper maintenance. They also produce organic byproducts in the dry compost and liquid products, both of which are highly useful in agricultural communities. Thus they offer a sustainable, hygienic, and cost-effective (about $200 apiece) solution to the problem of improper human waste disposal.

That is not to say the design is without its drawbacks. Or better put, drawback (singular), because the only real foreseeable difficulty is the extra training needed to operate one correctly (otherwise you run the risk of ending up with sixty nice-looking boxes full of crap). . We can´t start building until after the rains (probably July at the earliest), so for now every couple weeks we have a community meeting and training session about a different aspect of the project (construction, maintenance, hygiene, etc.). The other day we played “pin the poop on the eco-toilet.” That was a good time – there´s nothing like getting a roomful of hard campo dudes to giggle like schoolgirls at their friends blindfolded, dizzy from being spun around, stumbling to pin a picture of poop on the wall. I´m almost grateful for the rainy season, because it gives us a ton of time to make sure everyone is on the same page and that each family complies with its commitments to the project. Right now I´m spending a couple days a week in Naranjo (about an hour and a half´s hike from Chalaco), walking around and visiting with each family, answering any questions and doubts they might have, and mapping out possible locations near their houses for the bathrooms. Once you get past the turning-your-poo-into-dirt confusion, you find yourself faced with a whole new batch of unexpected technical questions, some of which become instant classics. One man was particularly worried about the separation of solid waste from liquid. The conversation went something like this:

Mateo: “So do you have any questions about how the bathroom works?”
Señor Jorge: “Well uh, actually, yeah…some of us were talking…and uh, well, about this whole separation idea…”
M: “Yes…”
SJ: “Well uh, so…so I´m a man, right? And so peeing is easy, you know, standing up and stuff...”
M: “Uh-huh…”
SJ: “Right, so…but what about when you´re going, you know, number two, and then you gotta pee…at the same time? What then??”

The Spanish version is even better, because the way it is said around here translates as: “when both desires touch me at once.” This was my fault; I hadn´t yet brought out a model of the “special” toilet seat to show them, and obviously my explanation of how it worked had been less than adequate. Another funny observation was in regards to the time in months it takes to fill up one of the brick chambers with waste. When asked, I responded, in total seriousness, “Well that depends on how many people are using it. And how much they eat.” The room exploded in laughter, and it´s since become something of a running joke (“Hey Mateo, how much space does rice-poop take up compared to potato-poop, HAHAHAHA,” and the like). One thing I´ve learned, to my great delight, is that bodily functions are hilarious, regardless of culture, age, or other superficial differences we might have.

I´ve also run into some interesting issues reflective of everyday life in the campo, which may seem insignificant, but are actually the kind of things that can make or break a project. Example: an added benefit of the eco bathroom is that you can throw your used toilet paper in the hole as well, because it, too, will decompose. Here in Perú you always deposit your used TP in a separate trash can, because the piping can´t handle the added bulk. This applies not only to flush toilets, but also to pit latrines, so as to delay the hole´s inevitable filling-up. Unfortunately it can create an anti-hygienic situation, because people will simply throw out the used TP along with their other trash, generally right behind the house (which might also be where they plant their vegetables and/or where their pigs eat whatever they come across). So the eco bathroom takes care of this problem, but the question that came up was, “What if we don´t use TP?” I know what you´re thinking, and that´s not it. It´s not that they don´t wipe, but rather that when your land produces just enough to feed your family, investing in TP isn´t exactly your top priority. So many families use their kids´ old notebooks from school (rip out a page, crinkle it up…). Magazines, newspapers, and anything else with pages also work, as do tree leaves. This was one of those “Oh God” moments where I thought the whole thing might go up in flames because of a stupid oversight on my part. But after some thought, we decided that this wasn´t a problem; paper would decompose no matter what, it just make take longer with glossy magazine pages. My initial reaction may seem overblown, but it was precisely this kind of tiny oversight that caused the extensive “improved wood stove” project a few years ago in Chalaco´s villages to be a massive failure. Just this kind of little nuances were ignored, the things didn´t work, and people have not only gone back to cooking over an open fire, but are generally opposed to any attempt to change their cooking habits, having been completely disillusioned with the idea.

All this and we haven´t even started the fun part – building the things – which I am really psyched about. After a year-plus working in purely “capacity-building” projects, I can´t wait to actually build something that will be here for years after I leave. Without a doubt there will be lots more stories to tell once we break ground. Not to mention a healthy amount of drinking, too, if my experiences here are any indication.