Water and Sanitation and Extraterrestrial Amphibians and Penises on the Dogon Plateaus

Mali is home to one of the few most isolated and anthropologically fascinating cultures in the world: the Dogon tribe. Originally the Dogons were a paganist tribe which hailed from southern Mali where they worshipped the stars and extraterrestrial beings. That is not a misprint; the culture of the Dogon is predicated on the belief that they were visited by amphibious humanoids called Nommos hailing from a planet orbiting the Po Tolo - which in Dogon is the name of the smallest known seed. Dogon tradition espouses that Po Tolo is white in color, and that it is the heaviest star because it is made out of sagala - an uncomprehensibly heavy metal. This has also taught that the miniscule star rotates on its axis, that it has an elliptical orbit with a companion star as the focus, and that the period of Po Tolo's orbit is 50 years.

This star which does in fact exist is known to Westerners as Sirius B, an ultra-dense white dwarf orbiting Sirius A so small and so distant that it is invisible to the naked eye - technology to photograph this star did not exist until 1970. The period of Sirius B's orbit is now known to durate for exactly 50.04 +/- 0.09 Earth years. Centuries before Copernicus and Galileo, the Dogon also knew of the heliocentric solar system in that the planets revolve around the Sun, the rings of Saturn and the four major moons of Jupiter. All of this was taught by a culture which otherwise has very little history of mathematics or astronomy, no telescopic technology, and has for the past thousand years chosen to live in isolation from their neighboring tribes.

Dogon belief holds that there is a third star in the Dog Star system known as Emma Yar, and that this star is circled by a single planet from which the Nommos hail. To date, even Western astronomers equipped with the Hubble Telescope and the most sensitive photographic technology ever known to man have yet to discover a third member of the Sirius star system.



According to legend the Dogon were once the brothers of the Bambara tribe. But in the 12th century intertribal relations soured when the Bambaras and Fulanis adopted Islam en masse, because the Qur'an explicitly teaches that the enslavement of other Muslims within the Dar al-Salaam is haram, but that it is perfectly acceptable to enslave the pagans and idolaters of the Dar al-Harb. And so in the 12th century the Bambaras and the horseback-riding Fulani tribe began to raid Dogon villages for slaves. Over the next few hundred years the Dogons fled their ancestral homeland, completely relocating their society to the central plateaus by around 1490. As hostile as the terrain was, upon high vantage points accessible only by solitary mountain passes Dogon warriors with spears and slings could easily defend their villages from Bambara and Fulani raids.

The central plateaus were not such welcoming terrains either, for they were already occupied by the Tellem people. Very little is known about this ancient culture except for the dwellings they left behind in the caves and crevices of the cliffs. Judging by the dimensions of these stone and mud dwellings, the Tellem must have been a very diminutive people akin to Pygmies. Apparently the Tellem also lived in the plateaus because they sought sanctuary from hostile tribes – archaeologists have excavated so few of these huts because they are extremely difficult to reach even with 21st century rock-climbing equipment. Archaeologists believe that a millennia ago the climate of this region was so much more humid and lush that the Tellem might have been able to climb up sturdy vines to their dwellings - Dogon legend maintains that their predecessors had wings and sticky feet like geckos which allowed them to scale the cliffs.



The flightless Dogons have been unable to inhabit the cliff dwellings of the Tellem, but in the roughly eight centuries that they have been living on the flat tops of the plateaus they have built their own villages, most of them a good day’s hike from any road and accessible only by the dexterous foot, and nothing too heavy to be carried by humans can make it in or out. The style of the Dogon huts is fairly approximate to what they were building a millennia ago back when they coexisted with Bambaras and Fulanis in what is now southern Mali, but due to the hardships of this rugged terrain there are a few main differences. In my own Minianka village, logs and mud constitute 95 percent of all construction materials, but high up on top of the plateaus there are no riverbeds where one can find ample supplies of mud, there are very few trees large enough to make sturdy skeletons. In Dogon Country all structures of any sort were made primarily out of rocks fit together with no mortar. Centuries ago there were more than enough rocks large enough to build a decent hovel, but now that the population has greatly expanded they have to import dynamite to blast apart boulders into usable sizes.



Islam is gradually making headway especially with young Dogon men who have lived in the cities, but up on the plateau, most Dogons continue their traditional animist practices as though monotheism never happened. Here an elderly holy man manages a rock garden which he uses to predict the future.


He is drawing designs in the beds of sand accompanied by the arrangement of sticks, pebbles and cowry shells – which according to Dogon belief are posing questions to the all-knowing fox. In the middle of the night, the fox is expected to come and alter the designs and arrangements ever so slightly, and only the holy man pictured here can decipher the fox’s answers.

Dogon Country has all of its own special development problems. To begin, water access is prohibitively difficult; and obviously there are no bodies of water on top of these barren rock faces, there is very little precipitation, and the Dogons have built their villages upon cliffs which purposefully arduous to reach. The only way for Dogons to eat, drink, wash and bathe is to send their women down to streams in the valleys many kilometers away from the village, and every time a woman draws water she then has to climb many kilometers back up those very steep paths with a heavy bucket of water on her head. In some villages, we’re talking about an entire morning's trek just to draw a single bucket of water. Of course the water in these streams is most likely contaminated with feces and giardia cysts, so right from the bat the Dogons are suffering from more water-borne illnesses than other Malian tribes. Since the sparse water supplies are most immediately needed for drinking and cooking, the Dogons almost as a rule have insufficient water for hygiene purposes, and as a result they suffer from more prevalent trachoma, dysentery, etc. relative to comparable Malian societies. Water is so scarce for human needs alone, thus raising livestock and growing garden crops is exponentially more onerous. And since women have to spend so many additional hours merely drawing water, they have less time than even overworked Minianka women to engage in lucrative economic activity or gain an education.



Over the past half century missionaries and NGOs have been disproportionately active in the most isolated and underdeveloped cranny of Mali trying to help the Dogons achieve the basic necessities of infrastructure. For example, a French group paid the men of one village to carry cement to the base of the plateau so that they could build a catchment basin underneath a spot where rainwater drips down from the cliffs. Their cistern has done a decent job of catching water, but somehow it also caught frog eggs and fish spawn – yes, somehow fish spontaneously generated in an artificial inland pool uphill from any other body of water. So that particular village has more water now, but it’s so polluted with concentrated frog and fish feces that it is even less potable than that from the stream many kilometers away. The women of that village still have to go to the stream to draw water three times a day.

When it comes to my line of work, there’s only so much that can be realistically done. The water table is so far low under impermeable rock - the lowest point of some villages is multiple hundreds of meters above - that hand-dug wells are not a possibility. Even in the valleys below the cliffs, the only way that one could possibly reach the water table is by drilling a well with mechanized drilling tools which are themselves extremely heavy and difficult to transport by hand up and down mountains to the isolated valleys where they could be of any use to Dogon villages. In so many words, the equipment needed to simply drill a well is so expensive that the Dogon could never finance a well project on their own. But even if an NGO parachutes in and drills a well in the valley to provide a particular village with a source of potable water, the women of that village still have to make their arduous hike down to the valleys and back up to use any drilled wells or hand-pumps.

Even worse than the water access problem, there is an unavoidable waste management problem inherent in living on top of a plateau. Even the mud brick “traditional nyegens” built in my own village are not practical technologies in Dogon Country – they’re living on top of solid rock, and short of a ready supply of dynamite it is impossible to dig a latrine pit by hand. Technically, one could theoretically blast a latrine pit with dynamite, but dynamite is already so expensive that the impoverished Dogons would never use it for anything other than to provide rocks for their own houses.

When Peace Corps Volunteers come into these villages to live for two years, PC Bamako has to first come in and ensure that our own housing needs are adequate - and Peace Corps regulations entail that doing as the Dogon villagers do and pooping out by the pooping rocks is quite inadequate. That means that if a Volunteer is going to live in a Dogon village, PC Bamako usually has to come in beforehand and build these revolutionary new “toilet” things just so that we can live there ourselves. It is next to impossible to dig a latrine pit down into the solid rock plateaus, so they have to take rocks and cement and “dig” up. Instead of digging a latrine pit, they build up a large one-story basin which serves as an above-ground latrine pit, and so our raised nyegens in Dogon Country are on the 2nd floor.

 

I Say I've Got a Real Solution...

I don’t think that you have any obligation to give to charity. I don’t think that people in Mali have any right to expect your generosity. I don’t believe in Socialism, I don’t believe in hand-outs, I don’t believe that just throwing money at the endemic disease and poverty in this country is going to make anything better. The vast majority of the time, I think that the best thing for Americans to do is to let the people of Africa solve their own problems themselves.

But every once in a while, someone like Etienne Dembele rides his motorcycle up to my gate. He wanted to know if I could help him find a certain “Madu Sogoba” – Dembele had heard that he builds toilets.

“Vous êtes arrivés à la vraie maison”, dit Monsieur Sogoba.

M. Etienne Dembele explained the situation. He hails from the village of Tounto – a 12 km ride from my own Sanadougou. Tounto is a settlement of some 4,000 people who are mostly simple millet farmers. They have a market, a small clinic, a primary school. Until recently they didn’t even have a secondary school – if the children of Tounto wanted to continue their studies to the 7th, 8th or 9th grade they had to wake before dawn at the call to prayer and walk the 12 km to le Diaramana Secondaire Cycle and back every schoolday. Dembele organized the parents of Tounto to petition le Bureau de la Mairie de la Commune, le Sous-Prefet de la Cercle, even their representatives in the national parliament and every NGO they could find to try to build them a secondary school. They all said no. So Dembele spent 4 years collecting funds from the people of Tounto itself and in the last year commissioned some local masons to build the school themselves.

If you’re not really familiar with the customary patterns of development in countries like Mali, the story of Etienne Dembele and le Tounto Secondaire Cycle is about as remarkable as they come.

However, there was one little problem; Monsieur Dembele was able to raise all the funds for a schoolhouse – but he came up short to build anything else. There is no well or pump in the schoolyard, so before class each day kids have to fetch drinking water from the clinic 1,000 meters away. This is a hassle, but it’s doable.

But more importantly, Dembele wasn’t able to raise enough funds to build latrines. So when the 7th, 8th and 9th-graders have to “go to the bathroom”, they have no choice but to just squat in the field next to the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse was built in a pretty open plain by the main road going through town, there aren’t even trees or bushes to hid behind, so these kids are more or less urinating and defecating in plain sight of each other and anyone else who happens to pass by on their motorcycle.

Since there’s no nearby water source, there aren’t even the customary plastic teapots that Malians typically use to wash their hands after they cleaned their butts. Maybe the kids can find some grass or leaves and wipe their hands off. But no matter how hard you wipe your hands with a couple of twigs they really can’t get all the poop or pee or diarrhea completely off their fingers, there will always be some residual germs. And then when they come back to the classroom they’re going to share their scarce textbooks and pencils with all the other students. And of course they’re going to share whatever germs they might have.

Etienne Dembele estimates that 75 percent of all of the students at this school come down with diarrhea over the course of the year, at least 65 percent come down with full-blown dysentery because they have to learn with classmates who cannot go to the bathroom in a sanitary fashion.

The Director of the Secondaire Cycle, Monsieur Fousseyni Sogoba is a generally cheerful young professional in his early 30s. But when he speaks of the lack of sanitary facilities at his school his face contorts into a raging scowl, “My students are children as young as 12, but in the highest grade they are as old as 16, 17 years. The female students are of marrying age, and in our Muslim society it is dishonorable for a woman to be seen undressed by a man who is not her husband. For them to urinate and defecate in the open is the greatest shame. The girls who have diarrhea are condemned.”

The epidemiological hazards of open defecation effect all students equally, but the shame factor hits schoolgirls the most. When girls feel disgraced by shitting in the field for the whole town to see, they simply stop going to go to school – this is especially true when puberty hits and they start menstruating. Though women slightly outnumber men in this society, girls make up less than 40 percent of the student body at Tounto Secondaire Cycle. They make up less than a third of all Secondaire Cycle graduates.

I agree with the Peace Corps philosophy of development which emphasizes those projects which consist of pure education, which require no financial expenditures. But in certain extreme situations, no progress can come about without some significant capital investment – this is one of them.

I told Monsieur Dembele that if he was really serious about building latrines, he had to find out the prices for all the materials we would need and to write up a budget. Two weeks later, he showed up at my gate once again - with a comprehensive budget, typewritten in French. Even after checking all the prices out myself there wasn't all that much to edit. I had never before witnessed this kind of gumption and initiative and professionalism in this country, and to tell you the truth I was downright dumbfounded.

So for the first time in more than a year in Mali, I have agreed to help a local activist fund his project.

Dembele and I have submitted a proposal to Peace Corps Washington to build two first-class latrines - one for boys and one for girls – and three hand-washing stations at the Secondaire Cycle. First the people of Tounto are going to pay a team of well-diggers to excavate the latrine pits. Then after the harvest the dugutigi is going to charge the men of the village out to the fields to gather 100 donkey cartloads of sand, 60 carts of gravel and 12 carts of porous sedimentary rocks. Once these are in place, we are going to Koutiala to buy all of the cement, rebar, plastic tubes, roofing, doors, etc. Tounto is going to pay a team of masons to build the latrines, and I am going to build the hand-washing stations.

Altogether, Tountokaw are paying for 29 percent of the overall cost in labor, transport and raw materials – the labor isn’t just being donated, they’re collecting 170,000 francs (~ $400) to pay the well-diggers and masons, and another 20,000 francs (~$48) to pay for the truck to carry it all from Koutiala to Tounto. The community’s contribution in cash is roughly equal to Mali’s per capita GDP.

And once construction is complete the village of Tounto is going to be responsible for cleaning and maintaining these latrines and hand-washing stations. Most likely the schoolchildren will be doing most of the cleaning themselves. UNICEF provides the school district with some soap, but it is nowhere near enough for these kids' hygienic needs and so parents will be responsible for paying for additional soap as part of the annual school fees. And of course, the teachers will be responsible for teaching and enforcing proper hygiene practices indefinitely.

Despite the drought and the fact that this is going to be a really bad year for all of Mali’s cash crops, the village of Tounto is ready to invest a significant amount of their scarce resources into improving the sanitation at their children’s school. I cannot emphasize enough that in a community as poor as Tounto, this effort is absolutely extraordinary. But they could use some help to pay for the cement, rebar, tin and plastic without which nothing that they contribute can be of any use.

And so, if you would like to donate to a cause which will prevent diarrhea and dysentery and help girls to have an equal opportunity in education, click here.

Update: Apparently so many people donated to fund this project that all of you donors cleaned up shop within 100 hours of it being posted on the Peace Corps website, before I could even bike into the city to post this on my blog. To all of those who contributed, from here in Mali I grant you a big "In'i che kosibe kosibe!!!!!" Thank you very very much!!!!!!

And to those who wanted to donate but didn't make it quickly enough, do not fear - all signs point that after the latrines are built in Tounto, there are plenty of other schools within biking distance of Sanadougou lacking in proper sanitary facilities. Stay tuned!!!!!


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Enter the Poopopticon

The best course I ever took in college was Professor Bumiller’s Regulating Citizenship. The syllabus itself wasn’t every impressive– it was mostly composed of elementary political writings of Locke, de Tocqueville, Thoreau and Martin Luther King which I had read in high school. But what made this course so enlightening was the format and location of our class: once a week ten “outside” students from Amherst College drove down Route 9 to meet with ten “inside” students in the visiting room of the Hampshire County Jail.

The “inside” students were not hardened criminals but guys who happened to have been given a bad deck in life and royally screwed up, but they deserved a second chance. “Camp Hampshire” – as it was affectionately known by those who had made it through the meaner penal regimen at State – provided a community-based rehabilitation program, offering residents drug counseling, psychotherapy, G.E.D. certification, training in carpentry, quilting, and seeing-eye dog training. Through the course of their stay residents were incrementally allowed more and more freedom of movement, culminating in the final stage when they resided in quarters outside the sealed gates of the central compound and could essentially walk in and out as they pleased and vans would drive them off the facility grounds so they could work part-time jobs. The overriding purpose of this entire scheme was to “re-socialize” those whom society had apparently failed the first time around, so that the next time graduates of the Hampshire County could re-enter conventional society with marketable skills, find a decent job and conduct themselves in a lawful manner.

The most tantalizing class was the day when we discussed Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment, namely, his analysis of Jeremy Bentham's ideal reformatory: the Panopticon. According to this scheme lawbreakers should be reside in a ring of transparent cells ringed around a central guard tower so that guards could monitor all prisoners at all times. Every sinner would be conditioned into good behavior by the sight of the ever-present guard tower, for it would always be much too obvious to the prisoner that his every behavior could be monitored. Whether or not there was actually a guard in the tower conducting surveillance at any given moment was irrelevant – the individual prisoner could never know. And so he would have to assume that he was in fact being watched in perpetuity as though by the all-seeing eyes of God. The convicted criminal would thus have no choice but to adopt self-discipline and learn to conduct himself with upright character and morality at all times.

Foucault and Mill were quite relevant to the daily lives of every single “inside” student, for though they enjoyed a liberal degree of freedom at the Hampshire County, they were self-disciplined into good behavior by omnipresent video cameras which were linked to live-feeds into the central guards’ surveillance room. An “inside” student pointed at the silver orb hanging from the ceiling,

“We know what da Panopticon is all about! Here we gotta stand in line cuz we is bein’ surveillanced every single minute of every single goddamn day!”

This experiment in academia has proved to actually be quite useful in my real-life experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer trying to promote water sanitation in Mali. Here the biggest public health issue I’m dealing with isn’t a crime as defined by any legal code, but an act so heinous that it is treated with the palatable euphemism “open defecation”; i.e. children shitting all over the public school grounds.

Every single day when I walk to Karitie and Durcas’ house for lunch, I walk past the Première Cycle. The sanitary infrastructure on this schoolyard is actually quite impressive for a rural town in Mali; there is an India/Mali pump so that the students and teachers can drink clean, filtered water at all times, and there are three sets of latrines – one of them brand spanking new. The kids know how to get their water from the pump – sort of – but it is quite apparent that they do not quite grasp what they are supposed to do with these latrines. In one hour I sat with Durcas under her gwa and counted 14 kids who actually ventured inside the nyegens and do their business, 11 children who defecated in back of the nyegens, and 8 of them who just dropped their pants and shamelessly pissed in the middle of the schoolyard.

“Durcas, this just doesn’t make any sense. It actually takes more effort for these kids to walk behind the nyegens than it does for them to walk inside the nyegens. Why on Earth do they insist on expending more energy to shit and piss outside?”

“Je ne sais pas! You have done everything that you can possibly do to tame these nasty children. You have organized the student government to properly clean the inside of the nyegens on a weekly basis…”

“ – But the problem here is what kids are doing outside the nyegens that’s so unsanitary.”

“You have even trained your puppy Snoop to tackle nasty children he sees pooping…”

“ – But ever since Snoop maimed Bobacar’s sheepling in the fields I’ve had to keep him chained up all day.”

“Then there is nothing more that you can do.”

“But there is! I’ve been trying to get Karitie to let me teach his students just one class on how to go to the bathroom – but he still won’t let me… Speaking of the Devil, here he comes right now! Karitie!”

“Oui?”

“Watching these kids shit so near the water pump day in and day out is simply intolerable. What do I have to do for you to let me teach these kids a lesson in proper defecation?”

“I have already told you that you should beat these nasty, nasty children. Here in Mali when children are misbehaving that is what we do – we rip a switch from the tree and spank their butt until they cry! Unless you teach my students that there is a price that comes with pooping outside, and that that price is a very painful beating, I refuse to let you step foot in my classrooms.”

“I still don’t want to tell these kids that I, personally am going to beat them – some of these 8 and 9-year-olds are my best friends in this entire village! I’m sure there is some way that we can compromise...”

So that afternoon I put on my General Patton face and went from class to class to lead a stern conversation on personal hygiene and sanitation. I greeted all the students, greeted their teachers and after a little small talk abruptly broke the ice; “I have to poop” and squatted down in front of the blackboard as though I were going to do it right there in front of the class. “Do you think that this is a good place for pooping?”

“NO!!!” (Asking questions always catches the kids off guard, they are so used to being lectured at)

“OK then… How about I poop here behind the teacher’s desk? No one can see me!”

“NO!!!”

“Is it ever OK for me to poop or pee inside the classroom?”

“NO!!!”

“Why not?”

“It is DIRTY!!!”

“That is correct! Pooping or peeing in public places with lots of people is the dirtiest thing in the world! And that is why I am very mad . Today I watched 19 children poop and pee outside the nyegens. Do you think that pooping and peeing outside in the schoolyard is OK?”

“NO!!!”

“Do you know what diseases you can get from people pooping and peeing outside?”

Answers included “Malaria!”, “Headache!”, “Coughing!” even “AIDS!”

“Close… but not quite. Who here has heard of dysentery, cholera or schistosomiasis?”

This very unscientific survey made me think that absolutely no one in the subpopulation of Sanadougou most likely to fall ill to these wretched maladies had heard of them previously. That was a very frightening thought. So for each class I drew a diagram of the water pump on the schoolyard all the way down to the water table.



“Here is a schoolgirl named Aminata Sogoba. She is drinking water from the water pump. Do any of you know how other students might make Aminata sick?..

Pooping and peeing outside in the schoolyard, of course!”

So I drew a highly exaggerated diagram of how diseases are transmitted via open defecation and urination – the Bambara language doesn’t take very well to metaphors or similes, so I had to make my diagram as straightforwardly literal as possible.



“…So you see, when Aminata drinks water contaminated with Bakary’s poop she has a good chance of getting sick with giardia or dysentery or even cholera and she might even die because Bakary took a dump too close to the water supply. Who here has had diarrhea in the past month?”

Everyone raises their hand.

“There’s a good chance that you had diarrhea because your classmates have been pooping all over the schoolyard and their poop somehow got into your mouth. Either their poop went directly into the drinking water, or it got on a soccer ball – which someone picked up with their hands – and then they picked up a pencil – and then you shared that pencil – and then you put your finger in your mouth. Every time that children poop out in the schoolyard it gives you a greater chance of getting sick… So does anyone here want to get a really bad case of diarrhea again?”

“NO!!!”

"Does anyone want to get other people's poop in their mouth?"

"NO!!!"

“So what do you think we should do with dirty children who poop outside and put nasty disease seeds in the drinking water?”

“YOU SHOULD BEAT THEM!!!”

“You all should know that Karitie says that I should beat children who dirty the schoolyard with their poop. But I will not, I cannot do that. There are 428 of you and only 8 teachers and 1 of me – we adults can’t watch you when we have to work. Though since all of you go to school here, and it is you the students’ responsibility to fill the water jugs with clean drinking water and to clean the nyegens, it is now the job of each and every one of you to make sure that no one poops outside... You’re going to have to learn to discipline yourselves! So what are you going to do the next time you see kids pooping in the schoolyard?”

“I WILL PUNCH THEM!!!”
“I WILL KNOCK THEM DOWN!!!”
“SPANK THEIR BEHIND!!!”
“SMACK THEIR FACE!!!”
“SIT ON THEIR HEAD UNTIL THEY CRY!!!”

“Wow… that sounds like pretty awful punishment… and you all have wonderful imaginations. Though violence is horrible, and I do not encourage you to ever hurt anyone - but pooping near the water pump is even worse because it hurts many more people in ways that you cannot see. I would prefer that the next time you see kids pooping outside you teach them why they are spreading diseases and threatening other people's lives... But remember, Monsieur le Directeur thinks that kids who poop next to the water pump he drinks from every day should be beaten..."

"So in conclusion, next time that you have to poop or pee, where must you go?”

“IN THE NYEGENS!!!”

“Thank you, my good friends. May Allah grant you a day of peace and happiness.”

After visiting all eight classrooms in the Sanadougou Première Cycle; 1) I finally got the break I had sought for so long to teach these kids about water sanitation and fecal-orally-transmitted diseases; 2) Karitie got the warning he wanted that open defecation in the schoolyard shall result in corporal punishment; 3) Not once did I ever have to say that I would personally conduct any of these beatings. I was able to draw from these students own mouths that not only is shitting and pissing in the schoolyard absolutely intolerable, that it is an epidemiological hazard and a personal offense to the entire student body and faculty, and – the icing on the cake – that the students themselves would personally beat their peers who threatened them with disease and even death by depositing their waste in the vicinity of the drinking water pump. I think that this compromise worked out fairly well.

And of course the best way to judge a utilitarian policy would of course to measure its tangible results. Before my discussions on water sanitation roughly 2 out of every 3 students were shitting and pissing outside on the streets, in the schoolyard, next to the nyegens, anywhere but inside the nyegens. But since I introduced this strict new waste management policy and cooperative disciplinary regime, open defecation has come to a screeching halt. In the two weeks since neither Karitie nor Durcas nor I have yet to see another child drop their pants in the open.

They seem to have internalized the discipline of sanitary defecation out of fear of peer punishment as though they were policed by the all-seeing eyes of Allah.

There's a Mean New Sheriff in Town

Snoop Doggy Dogg is now five months old and he is the rowdiest, most playful puppy ever! He is so disproportionately shaped it is kind of hilarious – his legs and his midsection have yet to catch up with his head and his tail, so every time he sees me coming he gets so excited that he wags his tail so hard that his entire body wags back and forth to counter the momentum! Because when Snoop Doggy Dogg sees me coming he knows that we’re going to wrestle!!!

Snoop Dogg is not only the pokiest puppy ever in the whole wide world, but he is also as dumb as rocks. One of our favorite games is Snoop will try to chew my toes and I’ll kick him in the face and then he’ll try to chew my toes again and I’ll kick him in the face... We could play for hours and it’ll never get old. When our wrestling gets really intense Snoop will try to jump on my legs and knock me down, and so I’ll do the old “Boop – got your nose!” trick and hold him by the snout and if I pin his legs down with the other he doesn’t know what to do and he wriggles helplessly and whimpers.

As dumb as he might be, Snoop is actually quite artful when it comes to wrestling other doggies. The other four puppies in his litter have been distributed to human families throughout the neighborhood, so when we go for a walk and Snoop sees one of his brothers he goes ballistic and gallops down the street to pounce on them and knock them over into the death position.



Snoop fights dirty. One of his best moves is to wait until one of his brothers is squatting to take a poop and he’ll start galloping and with a running start he’ll leap and knock ‘em over! The other puppies don’t see it coming and are incapable of mounting a defense! For such a dumbass he’s a brilliant tactician.

So I was walking with Snoop down the road to my jatigi’s house, past the clinic where all the moms come to bring their shriveled little babies dehydrated from giardia diarrhea or amoebic dysentery, past the brand new schoolhouse and nyegens that the Japanese NGO just built and past the field where the kids run and play and defecate.

Karitie was right – the elementary schoolchildren continue to shit outside even when there are brand new, nice and clean nyegens open and available for their evacuating pleasure. And it’s really funny watching these kids try to hide themselves out of sight and pulling their pants down far enough to hide their little butts – they don’t want anyone to see that they’re taking a dump, and they’ll go out of their way to crouch down low in the field so that no one can see them, but they won’t walk 20 meters further to the nyegen where they could do their business behind closed doors. Often I will walk by and the kids will be shitting right next to the brand new nyegens. The issue isn’t that there aren’t enough nyegens per head or that they are improperly maintained (I have already taken care of that). The issue is that kids in Mali grow up the first four or five years of their lives naked from the waist down and their parents just let them shit wherever they feel like it, and when they start going to school at age six its difficult to get them to change gears and undo the most terrible of ingrained habits.

“Open defecation” – the technical term we sanitarians use for shitting in a field – is just about the worst behavior which kids could possibly conduct on the elementary school grounds in terms of disease transmission. This isn’t an issue of cultural relativism – it’s an issue of life and death. Sanadougou is a village where the 2nd highest cause of child mortality is diarrhea, a symptom of bacterial or parasitic infection which is transmitted by fecal contamination of water sources or the simple hand-to-mouth route. Allowing Malian kids to take a dump in the same field where their friends play soccer is like allowing prostitutes in Mozambique to sell sex without a condom, it’s like allowing American kindergarteners to bring a semiautomatic rifle to show-and-tell – this behavior is downright dangerous and it is irresponsible for adult members of this society to let it continue without punishment.

“I know it is very bad, that is why I teach the children to poop in the nyegens!” Karitie says.

“Well apparently your lessons haven’t been absorbed very well because your students are still shitting in the field.”

“We teachers have more important things to teach the children such as spelling and mathematics! You don’t have to teach class, so you should teach them that pooping in the field is bad.”

“Will you let me teach the first-graders a class on how to go to the bathroom?”

“No, now they must become literate. But from now on when you see children pooping in the field you should beat them! I, as Director of the Schools of the Commune of Sanadougou, grant you explicit permission to use corporal punishment to instill discipline.”

“NO!!! If I did that then the Peace Corps would like court-martial me or something.”

In truth, when I see these kids crapping in public I should beat them. However, I do not believe in using violence unless it is absolutely necessary and instead prefer to combat unsanitary behavior through the hard power of economic incentives and the soul power of satyagraha i.e. active non-violent resistance. Without a mechanism for negative reinforcement these hazardous habits will continue unabated, so I need to develop some non-violent means of associating the act of open defecation on the elementary school recreation field with the due consequences of filthiness and public humiliation. These negative repercussions need to be hammered in so deeply that the association between open defecation and shame is internalized and they will cease such atrocious behavior on their own.

I will never beat the kids in my village but I will let my puppy play with them. Forget about Pavlov’s dog – the schoolchildren of Sanadougou elementary are getting to know Madu’s dog!

It turns out that building a lifeguard chair on the field next to the schoolhouse is unnecessary because I have a perfectly expansive view of that field from my concession. While I’m working in the garden or even while I’m reclining under my gwa shoving mangoes into my face I can spot these evildoing dirty-bombers with ease.

Now I’m beginning to conduct an experiment in social psychology and public sanitation in which every time I see kids defecating out in the open, I rile up Snoop Doggy Dogg and get him in a playful wrestling mood. And I open the gate and lead him towards the schoolyard.

“See that little boy squatting in the field? He’s your new friend! He wants to play with you!”

Snoop then goes galloping into the sunset to show these kids some tough love – tough puppy love, that is!



Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww