In India, More Women Demand Toilets Before Marriage

Here's an absolutely wonderful article in The Washington Post explaining how the development of water sanitation infrastructure goes hand in hand with social development, namely the empowerment of women.

Moreover, this article hammers home a point that I really struggled to convey to my young male Malian friends: Improving your toilet improves your chance of gettin laid! If you don't have a quality toilet and septic tank, ain't no girl gonna be into you!

Maybe one day I could even disseminate similar sentiments about greywater recycling, urine separating and composting toilets amongst my American brethren... (insh'allah)

Progress is on the March!

Now that the harvest is complete, work on the Tonto Secondaire Cycle nyegen project is in high gear. I spoke with the three classes and bluntly explained that the American people have just bought them 400,000 francs worth of cement to build them decent latrines, and if they're not going to go to the fields and gather all of the sand, gravel and rocks for free then nobody will, and they will forever be shitting in the bushes. "An be fe ka aw deme, nga ni aw te na barake, aw ba fe ka boke kenema."

Within a week, the Secondaire Cycle student body all took time off their afternoons and weekends to drive their families' donkey carts to the fields, and now we have all the gravel and rocks we could ever need. Still having trouble with the sand somehow...

So now the brickmasons have been able to make more bricks, and the Tonto Youth Association made up of young men in their teens and twenties is providing the bulk of the labor. When I was last at the construction site 48 hours ago, the latrine pit and foundation had been completed. Now we need to build the soak pit, the latrine platforms, and then we can start building the walls of the latrine houses.

Though that's not to say that this project has been bereft of headaches. Our original plan was to build two latrines - one for boys and one for girls. And so I bought two doors - one for the boys' latrine and one for the girls' latrine. But then the Director of the school protested that there wasn't a completely separate latrine for the faculty (himself and two other teachers). So now my masons have acquiesced and have decided that we must be able to build three latrines with the materials purchased to build only two. All of the bricks are already done and made, and we I asked where the 3rd door is going to come from, and they told me "You are going to buy it!" I explained that I've already spent every last penny in project funds and that if they insist on fundamentally changing the project at the last minute then that's fine and dandy but they're going to have to finance all of the amendments out of their own pockets, and they said that they will...

May Allah grant us the will to succeed on this nyegen project!!!

Amiiiina...

"Anka cencen a kodogon."

Three months after this project officially began on paper, we have finally broken ground on the Tonto Secondaire Cycle nyegens. The blacksmiths have dug the majority of the latrine pit - though not all of it, and the brickmasons have made 516 bricks.





I apologize for our slow pace, but mind you the past few months have been the most important months of farmwork for the entire year - as this is when everyone harvests their millet, corn, rice and peanuts, and this is when the men sell their cotton to the CMDT textile mill in nearby Koutiala. I'm told that the pace will pick up over the next few weeks as the harvesting work finishes pyu pyu. This has been inexpressably frustrating to bourgeois capitalists like myself who will never truly understand that all of the well-diggers and brickmasons and blacksmiths with whom I am working are first and foremost subsistence agriculturalists who live and die by the rhythms of the seasons - and that there are, in fact, things more important than building toilets.

Among the greatest inexplicable difficulties in this project has been the procurement of sand. There's sand in every direction as far as the eye can see, but somehow it isn't making its way to the construction site like my local counterparts promised it would. And since they have yet to procure 100 cart-loads of sand, 30 carts of gravel, 12 carts of rocks, the brick-masons can't finish their job, the house-building master masons and their apprentices can't build the latrine structures, and I feel pretty useless. The upside of all this is that I'm on page 1108 of Les Misérables...

To give you a taste of just how frustrating it is to organize a project like this, in Minianka-Bambara society hardly a single decision can be made without unanimous consent of all the village elders. So last Friday I told the head mason that we needed about 70 more cartloads of sand, and he told me to come back on Thursday. So on Thursday (yesterday) they assembled all the old men to inspect the work site. After 40 minutes of debate and deliberation, they came to the conclusion: "There is not enough sand."

If all goes well, we should have all construction completed in late January or February.

Insh'allah...

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!!!!!


U

The Nyegenmason's Apprentice

(click here for musical accompaniment)

When most people recall the classical economics of Adam Smith, they usually think of his reverence for efficiency achieved by the division of labor, natural pricing determined by the forces of supply and demand, and his ideal of a free market unencumbered by arbitrary tariffs, regulations and monopolies. Conservative politicians love Adam Smith, because they can selectively quote bumper sticker-sized postulations of his to demonstrate why the free market is inherently perfect and the State should do nothing in regards to economic affairs but maintain courts of law and a strong military to enforce private property rights.
Though the craggy old Scot would probably be aghast if he were to trade in a modern Malian market, not because of anything the State is doing to interfere in its freedom, but rather the complete and utter lack of infrastructure needed to facilitate commerce in the first place. For your average Malian merchant to sell her goods at market, she must ride a donkey cart or walk with a basket of those goods on her head down many kilometers of glorified cow paths which can only be differentiated by the rest of the fields by the fact that multiple people and livestock have previously tread there. Even the roads in the capitol city are made of slightly more compacted dirt and mud. There is one colonial-era railroad from Bamako to Dakar and it derails about every other week, the few airports are little more than landing strips, electricity and running water are hard to come by beyond the major cities and even there they are spotty at best. With such inadequate infrastructure, so few goods can be bought and sold, so many deals cannot be transacted to begin with that it is difficult to argue that the anemic economy suffers from excessive government intervention.

The third duty of government, Smith wrote, is to provide “good roads, canals, and navigable rivers” to diminish the costs of transport, break down local monopolies and make all goods sold at market more competitive. He claimed that investment in trade routes benefit the country most of all, for “they encourage the cultivation of the remote” and “open many new markets to its produce.”

Adam Smith theorized that commerce runs most efficiently when pricing is set by natural supply and the output meant to match it – and he despised government subsidies which do little more than artificially raising prices for the benefit of favored industries. Smith would be loathe to see the Crown lavishing taxpayer money on the producers of consumer goods such as corn farmers and rice merchants – the only persons whom such subsidies could conceivably benefit would be the direct recipients and the government clerks who enjoy their political favor. Everyone else loses.

But what would Adam Smith think about subsidizing the construction of toilets?

In the 18th century, tenured professors at the University of Glasgow shat in chamber pots, which servants then emptied out into the streets. A chamber pot was nothing more than a simple utensil which could be easily fabricated by any blacksmith or tinsmith and sold at market for less than a shilling. Smith’s successors in the 21st century now use porcelain flush toilets which are also bought individually, but are connected to the municipal water grid to dispose of sewage at the local wastewater treatment plant. The waterworks, sewers and treatment plants are undoubtedly public infrastructure no less vital than roads and bridges, and the Mayor of Glasgow very non-controversially collects taxes and user fees to keep these units running. But each individual consumer must pay for their actual toilet themselves. Though a porcelain toilet is expensive, per capita income in modern, industrialized Scotland is so high that even a pauper on the dole can afford one – it is unthinkable that the modern British welfare state would have to intervene in this market at all.

But there are no centralized sewer systems in the small villages of the Malian countryside. The undeveloped agrarian economy is so indigent and struggling to provide even more basic needs like food and water that a sanitary toilet is considered a luxury item. Your average Malian builds his own home out of mud and sticks, and there is a good chance that he and his family scurry off into the woods when they have to poop or pee. If Amadou the millet farmer has any mud to spare, maybe he has built a “traditional nyegen” bokeyuro – a walled-in enclosure where one can shit in privacy. If he has found not only ample mud but also sturdy logs, then he can dig a latrine pit so that the bokeyuro fills up less quickly. All of his urine and dirty wastewater flows out into the open street.

In this economy without municipal wastewater management, an adequate toilet is certainly more than just a consumer good for the individual consumption – it is a vital piece of the most basic sanitary infrastructure necessary to maintain the health of the individual user as well as the public at large. Even a family of subsistence farmers who consume all that they produce, who produce only what they consume and do not trade at all in a market economy – who wouldn’t really benefit much from a railroad or a highway – need this sort of infrastructure so that they might abstain from the commerce of dangerous pathogens.

If Mali were a perfectly ideal market, all human beings would be so perfectly enlightened on their own rational self-interest and the free market would be capable of supplying those goods at affordable equilibrium prices without any outside interference. And since every person in this perfectly ideal market would so thoroughly comprehend why it is in their own self-interest to not live amongst their own raw sewage, everyone would build their own sanitary latrine and septic tank on their own volition. In a perfectly ideal market, even the poorest of struggling millet farmers would realize this fact and thus save the roughly 25,000 francs ($60) it costs to build a appropriately modern concrete latrine complete with a soak pit or infiltration trench.

However, judging by the fact that the streets of Sanadougou and every other Malian village where Amadou walks are full of puddles of piss and shit and diarrhea giving room to fly and mosquito breeding and the most nauseating algae blooms, it would be fair to say that the free market has failed on its own terms to provide adequate water/poop management infrastructure.

There are two major factors holding back the Malian latrine construction industry: lack of education and lack of capital. Amadou might have no desire for a modern latrine because he doesn’t understand germ theory and thinks that dysentery and cholera come from evil sorcerers. And even if he were to appreciate the value of a proper latrine, that 25,000 franc price tag for a single concrete edifice represents 12 percent of per capita GDP (Amadou the millet farmer’s annual income). Without a direct investment of fixed, circulating and human capital, the invisible hand isn’t going to wave Amadou’s wastewater away anytime soon.

The Republic of Mali is genuinely concerned about improving the health and well being of her citizens, but scanty revenue flows preclude a massive latrine construction campaign. But what Mali has been able to do is to call up her good friend Uncle Sam to establish a Peace Corps program. And ever since 1972, Uncle Sam has been sending dirty, grimy, sandal-wearing peaceniks like Zac Mason to this country to live in mud huts and farm organic vegetables side-by-side with our Malian hosts as a big anthropomorphic hand of friendship from the American people.



So should Peace Corps Volunteers like me correct this awfully foul-smelling market failure and build adequate water/poop management facilities for the Malian people?

Absolutely NOT!!! If anything is going to last in this unforgiving climate, it must be regularly maintained. If foreigners do all of the work and then leave, none of the Malians whose health depends upon these latrines functioning will know how to conduct maintenance or repairs, even if they did they would feel that they didn’t have to, and when these latrines inevitably break they will remain broken and unusable until the next NGO rolls into town - if ever - to fix them.

So should the Peace Corps pay for latrines and outsource all the labor to local contractors?

NO!!! Now when the latrines inevitably break, when the soak pits inevitably clog, all of the necessary maintenance skills would be monopolized by a select few. Every Malian man knows how to rebuild his mud hut after rainy season, and likewise there’s no better way to guarantee that each individual homeowner can clean and fix his own latrine than if he builds at least some of it himself. Even when technical masonry is needed, they should be there to at least participate in the more menial aspects of the job. This way, when things fall apart the individual will feel comfortable filling in the cracks, emptying out sludge themselves before it becomes such a problem that they need to hire a professional mason.

So should individual Malians provide all of their own labor and Peace Corps just foots the bill?

Still NO!!! If Malians aren’t willing to pony up for their own latrines, neither should Americans. If sanitation conditions and the standard of living are ever going to improve in this country, Malians have to get into the habit of contributing their own resources and investing in their own infrastructure.

So how do I, Zachary Mason, motivate the villagers of Sanadougou to turn off the boob tube, put down their tea pot, and invest their time and energy and pecuniary wealth into building roughly a hundred latrines and soak pits?

I could spend my two years here conducting an educational campaign to sensitize the populace on the virtues of sanitary waste management. Maybe a couple dozen people would ever show up. Maybe by some stroke of divine intervention I would inspire one or two Amadou the millet farmers to save 25,000 francs and invest in a modern concrete latrine and complete with sanitary wastewater disposal. More likely I would waste my breath.

Thus the strategy that I am using to jumpstart the moribund market in sanitary latrines and septic tanks has more to do something about the massive scarcity of fixed capital; to employ a generous direct subsidy program funded with a Small Project Assistance (SPA) Grant by the United States Agency for International Development. According to the SPA Grant formula, for every funded project the people of Mali have to provide at least 25 percent and the American people pay up to 75 percent of the total cost. The people of Mali have more than enough unused land and surplus labor, so in order to spur the development of the latrine and septic tank construction industry, USAID wired some 1,107,900 francs (~$2,500) to yours truly in order to buy a truckload of cement, plastic pipes, plastic sheets, rebar #6 and tie-wire.

I loathe the idea of distributing presents to my neighbors of Sanadougou, but this situation does not have to cast me in the role of Santa Claus. The purpose of this endeavor is to spur Sanadougoukaw to invest their own resources on sanitation, and unless Amadou the millet farmer is willing to pony up, all of those materials are going to gather dust in my storage room. Anyone who wants these expensive materials can get them for free – but receiving this USAID subsidy is completely contingent on whether or not they’ve already contributed the most strenuous, tedious and disgusting parts of the job on their own time.

To catch you up to speed, this is how you go from a bare patch of nothingness to a modern latrine and septic tank:

Step 1: I find a suitable location. It should be someplace close enough to where people spend most of their day so that they can relieve themselves with minimal inconvenience. However, the construction site cannot be less than 30 meters from a well in order to prevent the direct contamination of drinking water. I also have to know that the water table never reaches above 2 meters below ground-level at its rainy season height if it is appropriate to dig a soak pit. Otherwise we have to build an infiltration trench.

Step 2: Amadou the millet farmer digs a hole. This will become the latrine pit where all the shit goes. After about 0.7 meters of dirt, the earth in Sanadougou is composed of about 5 meters of fairly solid sedimentary rock until it turns back to sand again. So as long as the latrine pit is no more than a meter in diameter, a simple pit dug straight down into the rock like this is quite durable even without any cement lining.

Step 3: Amaou digs another, significantly smaller hole with a surface area of at least 1.7 square meters for person who uses the latrine daily. This will become the soak pit.

A dilemma exists for those who want a modern latrine but their current latrine is nearly full; it makes no sense for me to devote expensive construction materials on full latrines which would need to be broken and emptied or abandoned altogether within a short span of time – I demand that latrine pits be at least nearly empty. If someone’s latrine is full and they have no room to dig a new latrine pit, then we have to build over the old one – but first, someone has to empty the latrine pit. If the homeowner hasn’t the wherewithal to jump down into the warm, maggoty muck and remove bucket after bucket of their family’s shit and piss and diarrhea, they have to hire someone to undertake the most undesirable job in the entire world.

But first, my Malian neighbors have to ante up. Granted, they probably don’t have a lot of cash to contribute. But Adam Smith insisted that the definition of capital cannot be limited to hard currency circulating throughout the economy – there is also “fixed capital” i.e. physically tangible tools and raw materials which can be invested to form additional units of capital. To build a nyegen and a soak pit we need a lot of sand, gravel and porous sedimentary rocks; in the city you have to buy those materials, but here en brousse there are ample supplies of sand, gravel and rocks free for the taking out in the fields.

Step 4: Amadou fills his soak pit with rocks.

At this point we call in my homologue Sidiki Sogoba.
Sidiki is a baller to the extreme. He is a fairly traditional Minianka Muslim who has two wives and nine children, he farms millet and peanuts and watermelons and he hunts rabbits with his colonial-era musket. Sidiki is my best friend in town, and the best mason in the entire Commune. He does flooring, roofing, bricklaying and finishing – but his specialty is in nyegen construction. I am his apprentice.


If Amadou gives Sidiki sand and gravel, I give him cement, rebar #6 and tie wire, Sidiki can (Step 5): make a sanitary platform.

A sanitary platform is the keystone to a durable, easily-maintainable latrine. The rebar-concrete slab is built so that it is amply larger than the pit itself, so it can easily support its own weight plus that of whoever happens to be squatting upon it. It would be quite difficult to cause the sanitary platform to collapse if it was installed properly, and even if it did collapse, it is built so that it is easily interchangeable, replaceable and reusable. The sanitary platform is molded with a penis-shaped hole in the middle where the poop and any misdirected pee goes (total coincidence) and two foot-sized pads where your feet are supposed to go to help aim your butt at the penis-shaped poophole (the location of these pads were determined after decades of research by leading scatological projectile physicists). Then Sidiki molds a penis-shaped concrete blob with a rebar handle (this is intentional) so that it fits into the penis-shaped poophole. This is so that the user of this sanitary platform can keep a lid on it at all times when they’re not using it so that flies and mosquitoes and cockroaches and bats do not nest and reproduce in the latrine pit.

After three days of drying and curing, the sanitary platform is ready for installation! Sidiki hauls it over to the construction site via his trusty donkey cart.

At this point, (Step 6) Sidiki and I prepare the rest of the nyegen floor with gravel. Then (Step 7) we take the remainder of the cement, sand and gravel, then mix it all into concrete, and lay a smooth concrete flooring. My dad sent me a level once used by my grandpa when he ran a tiling and flooring company, so Sidiki and I can ensure that gravity pulls any pee that falls beyond the sanitary platform urine catchment flows downhill to the plastic tube.

Up until September 10, 2008, Sidiki Sogoba had been doing Steps 1, 2, 4, 5, 6and 7 by himself on the latrines of Sanadougou’s well-to-do who could afford cement on their own dime. However, since I have taught Sanadougoukaw how to dig a soak pit (Step 3), Sidiki’s nyegens now come equipped with a more sanitary outlet for wastewaters than the adjacent street. So my personal contribution to Malian water/poop management infrastructure construction technology is … (drum roll please)…

(Step 8) I take a plastic tube, I stick it between the latrine floor and the pit of rocks, and then I cut it!!!

And then (Step 9) I take a big plastic sheet and cover up the soak pit rocks and tube. And then (Step 10) I shovel mud on top of everything. This way, when you pee, all of that stinky, possibly schistosomiasis-carrying micturate winds up underground where it can’t hurt anybody. Since all of the potentially contaminated wastewater is out of sight, no flies or mosquitoes are going to breed in human sludge or simply stop for a sip and then buzz off to spread whatever pathogens they find in human drinking water or food. What was once a puddle of fetid disgustingness is now a regular, boring patch of wholesome-looking earth!

Then, finally, the most important step: (Step 11) the owner of this brand new latrine pays Sidiki Sogoba for a fair day’s skilled labor. His current rate is 2,000 francs (about $5) per latrine. This step is very, very important, because even if the most expensive construction materials were paid for with a USAID grant, unless they can do all of the skilled masonry themselves, each individual who wants a modern latrine still has to pony up a sizable amount of his or her own cash. Though this is a heavily subsidized project, no one here is getting a freebie – not on my watch.

In all, if Malians want to build modern latrines under this program, they have to provide all of the land, labor, and raw materials in the form of sand, gravel and rocks – what the U.S. taxpayer is paying for is cement, plastic tubes, plastic sheets, rebar #6 and tie-wire. When you calculate how much work or money goes into digging or emptying the latrine pit, collecting rocks, sand and gravel, and then paying Sidiki for his masonry skills (25 percent of the overall cost), allocating the generous subsidy (75 percent) for manufactured materials does not feel to me like handing out presents – it’s more like just rewards for hard work which benefits not just the individual owner of the nyegen but the health of everyone who lives and works and purchases food in Sanadougou. Especially if the person using this new concrete nyegen already has giardia, dysentery, cholera or schistosomiasis, the new fancy cement formwork isn’t going to help him as much as it is going to protect the rest of society from catching his contagious disease.

Since this is my first project, I conducted it as an experiment in human nature. The SPA Grant from USAID provided me with funds to build approximately 30 concrete latrines with soak pits and an additional 5 soak pits for those rare families who already have concrete latrines. After I received the money in February, I purchased the materials little by little to see exactly how much of a subsidy was needed to bring latrine construction into steady gear. I started with just the plastic tubes and plastic sheeting for the soak pits. So throughout February and March I canvassed the neighborhood, talking up soak pits with the head of every family, measuring the space behind their nyegens where all the icky wastewater flowed and trying to encourage them to pick up a shovel and start digging.

The response was underwhelming. After two months of canvassing, my host brothers did a half-assed job of digging an infiltration trench. And I somehow managed to convince one old man named Issa Dao (the father of the Secretary of the Mayor’s Office – who worked with me extensively in planning this project) to hire some unemployed idlers to dig holes behind his three nyegens and fill them with rocks. After two months of rabble-rousing I had finally found my first customer! So in April I went to San to buy 112 sacs of cement.

The tipping point in this subsidy’s catalyst effect would be the day I rolled into town on top of a truck full of 112 sacs of cement. Mind you, this is a society where the vast majority of houses are made exclusively out of mud. Only the wealthiest merchants and professionals can afford to line their floors with cement, the amount of cement that someone has used to feather their nest is a reliable indicator measure of their wealth and status. A truckload of cement is the biggest metaphorical carrot that these people will ever see in their lives. Once passersby saw what Sidiki and I were doing at Issa Dao’s house, and word got out that I had 106 sacs of cement left to reward whoever dug their soak pits and gathered their raw materials the quickest, it was as though Allah flipped a switch – something just clicked. From April through August, Sidiki and I have so far built 24 out of our quota of 30 latrines. I think we will be done with this SPA Grant’s worth of materials somewhere around October.

This project has also borne its fair share of hiccups. First of all, it seems that this subsidy has its greatest effect in motivating those people who have only a traditional mud nyegen and would like to climb up the status ladder with some cement. Even if it means that they have to dig a soak pit that they really don’t care about, if that’s what it takes they’ll do it. I have had a really hard time convincing people who already have cement-lined nyegens why it is in their best interest to do something about their wastewater – if people can’t grasp the concept of sanitation, a plastic tube isn’t much of a motivating incentive. So far I have only received a smattering of takers: Sidiki himself, two teachers and the “pharmacist” down the street.

If you remember in previous episodes, the “pharmacist” had two of the most egregious plumes of wastewater I’ve ever seen, and I told him that I can’t buy medicine there so long as the nyegenji is flowing and filth flies are buzzing around his wares. And y’know what? He dug a humongous soak pit and diverted all the nyegenji underground! I was totally shocked! …and then the “pharmacist” reminded me of “my end of the bargain”. Fuck. There’s still no way that I’m ever going to put one of his bootleg Chinese sugar-coated chalk placebos in my mouth, but now I make a habit of stopping by the “pharmacy” to buy his wife’s newly-sanitary beancakes for breakfast and all parties seem to be content.

The most tremendous problem is that 4,420 out of 4,428 inhabitants of Sanadougou live in mud huts, I rolled into town with 112 sacs of cement, and I want to use it all to build concrete latrines. I’m building latrines with materials more durable and infinitely more desirable than the mud which people use to make their houses. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “I don’t want cement for my nyegen, I want cement for my house!”

I can feel empathetic to their frustrations, but I can’t really do anything about them – this USAID financed cement is for latrines and latrines only. Every time I have one of these encounters, I try to explain how a concrete house benefits just one family while a concrete latrine with adequate wastewater removal benefits the health of everyone in society – unfortunately, this argument doesn’t get me very far in a society where illness is known to come from evil sorcerers, frogs, and whistling at night. So the only alternatives I’ve come up with are to either 1) pretend I can’t understand their Bambara and change the subject to “So, when are you going to dig your soak pit?” or 2) offer to sell them cement at the price I just bought it for – which they never will; or if they’re really persistent 3) just ignore them and walk away.

When I see a sack of cement I see it turning into a squeaky-clean latrine and transforming the sewage-filled streets into verdant boulevards full of trees and flowers; somehow other people see a sack of cement and see it turning into a motorcycle. A number of people have been frank in demanding “Madu, gimme cement so I can sell it and find money”, “Gimme 40 sacks of cement so I can sell them and buy a motorcycle”. I find such attempts to suborn my Peace Corps service into a gravy train to be so personally insulting that they don't deserve a polite response.

Though I’d rather not make it into a fight, so I craft an appropriately snarky absurdity, “Give me your entire herd of cattle, your sheep, your goats, the entire contents of your granary… actually, no, give me your granary too.” Joking cousins!!! You eat BEANS!!!

But some jerks are actually serious when they demand that I give them cement to resell. I really love it though when they to pull the cultural card, “In our country, when people have wealth they share it with their friends” – because then I get to throw it right back at them.

“In my country, do you know what we call a government employee who takes public property and sells it for personal gain?”

“No, what?”

“A criminal.”

In spite of these challenges, you, United States citizen, deserve to know exactly how the government is spending your hard-earned tax dollars. This is why I, Zachary Mason, Peace Corps Volunteer, believe so strongly in accountability and transparency that I go to painstaking lengths to keep immaculate records of my project budget and expenditures and document all of it online for all the world to see.

I’m making absolutely no exceptions to the integrity of my nyegen project. A number of people have commented on how disloyal I must be since I’ve made 24 concrete latrines in this village – but my host family’s nyegen is still made out of mud.

“I am tremendously loyal to the Sanogos, and I will cement their nyegen. But first they have to finish digging their infiltration trench, go to the fields and find sand and rocks and gravel…”

The fact that Sanadougoukaw have to pay for a sizable chunk of their new nyegen is what makes this project so much more sustainable than if I were just building them for free. In this country it is really easy to tell the difference between what buildings people have built themselves and what was a big fat NGO cadeau – whereas the former will be cost-efficient and repaired on a constant basis because people have already paid for the sunk costs of preliminary construction, the latter will inevitably decay and crumble and no one will put any time or money into it because they feel that they can just wait for the NGO to come back and build it again. The fact that my Malian neighbors have to pay at least 25 percent if they want a new nyegen is the only way to ensure that they have even the most basic semblance of its economic value – the 75 percent subsidy is the sine qua non which encourages them to spend that 25 percent in the first place.

So there are about 500 nyegens in the town of Sanadougou, Sidiki and I have perfected 24 of them, and factoring in the increased rate of construction, work patterns and the rate of population growth, every single nyegen will be cemented and sanitized in the year 2016. There’s no way that I’m going to be able to completely rid this town of icky wastewater by myself. Indeed, I am going to request that Peace Corps replaces me with a new Volunteer when I’m out so as to continue the successful campaign I’ve got going here. The mighty United States Peace Corps will trudge on fighting the Good Fight, but in the end we can’t be responsible for the upkeep of every last Malian’s toilet - after this period of midwifery, the subsidies are going to come to an end and the free market is going to have to finish the job. Hopefully, the valiant struggle of Operation Sphincter Plug shall demonstrate just how clean the streets can be if people just get off their asses and put their back into it, and we can win the battle of hearts and minds and bowels. One day, I can only hope that everyone in Sanadougou realizes the value of sanitation to the extent that their own reasoning is enough motivation for them to save and invest their own money into concrete nyegens and soak pits and contain their own waste. And if they do that, there might just be less flies and cockroaches and mosquitoes spreading pathogens around, people will face less risks to getting sick in the first place, and my neighbors the doctors will be less busy treating shriveled little babies dying from simple diarrhea.

Insh’allah…

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.