Triumph

It took nine excruciating months – more than twice as long as estimated. There were so many, many, many setbacks, and at times I was tempted by the prospect of accepting a half-built, grotesque failure for what it was and quitting. But when the Continental Army was facing hypothermia and starvation at Valley Forge, did Washington say to his troops “being a British subject isn’t all that bad… let’s just go home…”? When the Nazis ran a surprise winter counteroffensive in the Ardennes forest and decimated Allied battalions, did Eisenhower tell his soldiers “Whatever… it’s just the fate of the free world… Let’s pack our bags and fuck it…”? When Han Solo was frozen in a solid block of carbonite, did Luke tell Chewbacca “Well, we can’t fly without a pilot… maybe we should just succumb to the Empire”?

No.

And likewise, even after the village of Tonto surrounded by an endless expanse of sand proved incapable of finding enough sand to make bricks, Zac Mason did not give up. And even when handed a budget for two latrines and a wall and he came back from vacation to see that his construction crew had built three latrines behind his back – and the wall only went up to his ankles, Zac Mason did not give up. And then when the project was 90 percent done but the village of Tonto could not get the subcontractor to finish the job for a whole three months because some pinhead thought that it would be a good idea to pay the subcontractor in full in advance, Zac Mason did not give up. He wanted to kneel down so that he could smash his head against that ankle-high brick wall, but he did not give up.

But Zac Mason could not just build the nyegens himself. No, after throwing his back out carrying a ton and a half of cement from his porch to inside his house, there is no way that Zac Mason could ever have possibly done so much physical labor with his enfeebled spinal cord. Rather, Zac Mason set out twisting arms and working The System so that – despite the fact that Tonto increased the size of this project by 50 percent and threw out the budget that they had originally agreed to – they would still be held to the terms of their contract. Zac Mason had to twist those arms very hard.

And in the end, after a period of time comparable to the gestation of a human being, my own baby is finally finished. And now the students of the Tonto Secondaire Cycle are able to poop and pee within the confines of a modern, sanitary latrine complex. Exceeding all expectations, we have three latrines – one for boys, one for girls, and one for teachers. And we have a barrel with a spigot that the students are going to fill with water so that they can wash their hands – the traditional government of Tonto tells me that they are going to have the women provide home-made soap, and I can only hope that they will in fact do so. And the students are even more responsible for cleaning and maintaining their latrines from now until kingdom come. And so long as the students and adults of Tonto take responsibility for the proper use and upkeep of these nyegens, this construction project will have laid the groundwork for public sanitation and co-education.

Trench Peacefare

This one trick pony has expanded his repertoire. As loyal readers should know, the people of Mali suffer from completely unnecessarily high rates of giardia, dysentery and explosive diarrhea because the raw sewage from their “traditional latrines” flows out into the streets and the entire population is exposed to the dangerous pathogens which cause these illnesses and continue the positive feedback loop by making their way into other people’s mouths. Sewage is both a danger to public health and also a necessary byproduct of human life itself, and so this blog’s eponymous hero is busy spending the prime years of his youth and your tax dollars building modern latrines equipped with concrete floors and soak pits: a rudimentary septic tank technology appropriate for cultures in this harsh Sahelian climate with few financial resources and building materials.


In the flat center of Sanadougou where I live, the water table lies almost perfectly uniformly between 7.5 meters below ground level at the peak of hot season and 4 meters below ground level after the groundwater has been recharged by 4 months of rainy season. In the center of Sanadougou where about 3,800 of the 4,400 permanent residents live, development-minded villagers have been digging soak pits 1 meter deep and varying in diameter (usually about 1 to 1.5 meters) depending on the number of people in their households and the volume of wastewater generated by their respective nyegens. Since the pathogens originating in wastewater can usually seep up to half a meter through hard-packed soil and sedimentary rock, the water table should never come closer than 2.5 meters to the sewage generated by these modern latrines and thus the groundwater consumed through wells and pumps should be adequately protected from direct contamination by human fecal matter.

However, even within the demarcated borders of Sanadougou there are some places where the soak pit is an inappropriate technology. Namely, there is an outlying neighborhood called Filablena which is significantly lower in elevation than the rest of the town and sits around a couple of large seasonal ponds. Here the water table varies between 5 meters below ground level at the peak of rainy season and 1.5 meters below ground level after rainy season.


The wells here are so shallow, and with less rock they are cut into nothing but soft soil which is much more permeable and conducive to groundwater flows. The pressure in a well is somewhat less than within the soil, so the water levels of wells are slightly higher than the water table; in Filablena during rainy season, the well water surface is only slightly less than a meter below ground level.


If we built 1 meter deep soak pits here like we have in the rest of Sanadougou, soak pits would in fact exacerbate the water sanitation problem by directly polluting the groundwater with raw sewage. That contaminated groundwater would then eventually make its way to people’s wells from which they get the bulk of their drinking water. The absolute worst-case scenario would be that contaminated water makes its way into the seasonal ponds and – though it probably wouldn’t be as obvious as the ones which form behind "traditional latrines" – render them into gigantic seasonal cesspools.

In Filablena we are just beginning to introduce a specialized technology: the infiltration trench. An infiltration trench serves the same function as a soak pit in that it contains the wastewater emitted from “traditional latrines” underground so that it cannot serve as a fertile breeding environment for filth flies and mosquitoes and cockroaches and a vector for all sorts of disease. It has to be able to store roughly the same volume of wastewater as a soak pit, but in an environment where the water table is prohibitively high an infiltration trench must be dug at a much smaller depth. In truth, the volume of a soak pit is only really important so long as it briefly stores wastewater before in seeps into the surrounding soil and rock; what is much more important is the surface area which determines the rate of discharge into the ground where it is safe and isolated from human water and food supplies. Where there has not been a lot of room to maneuver, we have solved this problem by simply reducing the depth of our soak pits and increasing the diameter accordingly.

Infiltration trenches take that ideal of minimal depth and maximum surface area even further. First I found a group of Filablenakaw interested in rebuilding their nyegens, measured their dimensions and assigned them lengths of plastic piping between 4 and 6 meters in length. Then we took an afternoon and pierced holes in them; we took a dozen large nails and placed their ends in the fire until they became red hot, and with protective work gloves we held pliers to hold the hot nails and melted lines of holes down the length of the pipes. With these hole-ridden pipes, wastewater should flow out over a more evenly distributed area and facilitate more rapid and less concentrated wastewater seepage into the soil.


Instead of small circular pits, Filablenakaw have been digging 4- to 6-meter long trenches which begin about 20 centimeters and eventually expand to a maximum depth of no more than 50 centimeters. We fill them in with rocks in such a way that the plastic pipe is on a gradual incline downwards and wastewater flows all the way down. Then we fill them with more rocks to keep the pipe stable, and cover the end of the pipe with a large flat rock to protect it from closing up.


Eventually we’re going to cover the trenches all up with plastic sheeting and cover them with the dirt that was dug up in the first place so that the sewage is contained underground, people and animals can walk over them without falling in, and every year or so homeowners can open up their infiltration trenches to inspect them and clean them as necessary.

However, there are some negative aspects of this process which make the construction of an infiltration trench an unattractive option. The biggest down point of this technology is that burning holes in the plastic pipes produces noxious fumes and is fairly harmful to anyone who isn’t wearing a respirator – I covered my face with soaking wet handkerchiefs while doing this work, and even then I came down with really bad headaches. Infiltration trenches also require more than 6 times as much plastic piping and sheeting than your average soak pit – but the plastic materials are so cheap compared to the cement that goes into the nyegens that the cost of an infiltration trench cannot be prohibitively expensive to anyone who is building or revamping an entire nyegen. Nevertheless, in communities sitting atop extremely high water tables, infiltration trenches are the most practical, cost-effective technology available for sound wastewater management. It is unlikely that we will be able to completely sanitize Filablena's latrines with such infiltration trenches, but my hope is that the few models which we are building will serve as an example for the entire community to one day safely contain their waste underground and away from the rest of the water supply - 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...

Liquid Gold

One of my investment banker friends wrote to me musing how a poor country like Mali could escape its current stagnation; “Africa will need to diversify its economy away from commodities and raw materials into manufactured products if it has any hope of prospering”, he said, and when it comes to advancing from a subsistence agriculture economy to industrialization, “the bottom line is capital investment.” My friend saw the problem of African poverty in terms of underperforming GDP, a lack of final goods sold at market for currency to be saved in banks to accumulate with compound interest and re-invested so that capital can regenerate and expand unto itself. His view from Manhattan was fairly typical of anyone who makes their living in the trade of credits and debts, who views economic development in terms of developing a monetary economy and a self-contained industry of finance.

However, here in the muddy village of Sanadougou, most economic activity occurs in village without currency ever changing hands. Here the bulk of the population spends most of their labor planting and harvesting millet and rice and corn for their own family’s consumption. When the farming season is done, men spend the next largest chunk of their time building and rebuilding their own homes and granaries with mud and rocks and sticks that they find out in the fields. Women toil day in and day out drawing water and cooking and cleaning and taking care of their many, many children. Gross Domestic Product is such a grossly inadequate means of measuring economic development in this economy, for the food and housing and family networks which make up the bulk of the people’s tangible wealth are never sold as final goods on any marketplace.

The work done by Malian villagers that does count towards the monetary economy is decidedly secondary to food production, house construction and child rearing. In the relatively fertile Sikasso and the southern portions of Ségou, Koulikoro and Kayes provinces, surplus fields are allocated to farming cotton as a cash crop to be sold to the textile mills. In villages like Sanadougou, farmers produce such an excess of peanuts that they can sell them to urban populations who cook tigadegana. During rainy season women also gather shea nuts to cook a butter which is used to make soap and moisturizing cream. And of course all families raise some combination of cows, sheep, goats, chickens, guinea hens or rabbits for meat – only on holidays or weddings could most people ever justify slaughtering an entire goat, so villagers raise livestock mostly to sell to urban butchers. The money these villagers earn in exchange for these cash crops is what pays for their tea, sugar and gasoline. Altogether, the majority of such basic commerce is not transacted between villagers, for it consists of producing raw materials for the consumption of the urban merchant class or for manufacturing into finished goods by multinational corporations.

The most significant cash business in the traditional village economy which stays in the village for local consumption is the tilling of vegetable gardens. Most families have a small plot in their concession fenced in with sticks where they keep a papaya tree, a banana tree or two, and during rainy and cold seasons they can raise an annual patch of onions, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, sweet potatoes, yams or manioc. People tend to specialize in one or two crops and sell most of their output from garden season at market, but since tomatoes could never last the 57-kilometer motorcycle ride to the nearest city let alone pay for the cost of the gasoline, perishable produce can only be sold to other villagers. Fruits and vegetables are just about the only cash crops which are consumed in village and therefore insulated from the vicissitudes of global commodity prices and the distortion of First World subsidies. And thus in rural villages the most sustainable economic development takes the form of building gardens and improving their yields. Not only do improved garden yields increase monetary income, but since those yields are consumed in village they increase the population's intake of Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C, potassium, phosphorus, etc. An investment in gardens is an investment in economic development and public health.

The World Bank and USAID and NGOs get this quite well. The Western bureaucracies of Third World development love investing in vegetable gardens because not only does it beget economic activity that can be measured by capital-centric indicators like GDP, but building vegetable gardens sounds less like impersonal business and more like good ol’ American humanitarianism.

Unfortunately, the Humanitarian-Industrial Complex understands the value of vegetable gardening only so much as it can be conducted from the confines of their air-conditioned offices in Bamako. If the only tool in in your tool belt is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail - and at times it seems as though the only tool at their disposal is a big wad of capital that can only be spent on high-tech contractors also based out of the capitol city. So they buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware, pile into SUVs and swoop into villages and construct elaborate irrigation pump systems and build long chain-link fences for the Malians to plant gigantic community gardens.
But they never stay long enough to teach the people how to maintain the pumps – or they try as best as they can in French to a community that speaks only Bambara. So the pumps inevitably fall apart and no one can fix them and the “beneficiaries” of this big agricultural development projects can benefit themselves in no perceivable way other than dismantling the LEED-certified, solar-powered irrigation pumps and selling the parts as scrap metal. The professional vegetable gardening consultants designed their entire plan on the premise of a functioning irrigation pump, so they didn’t bother investing in quaint technologies like wells and pulleys, so even manual irrigation of this gigantic community garden is now impossible. With no irrigation system this vast plot becomes agriculturally useless, so the villagers pull up all the fence posts and use them to make fences around their own private gardens that they can water by hand. And thus the financial largesse of taxpayers and well-minded donors is all but wasted in a gargantuan orgy of cadeau give-aways and outright theft which does little more than enrich the most enterprising of bandits, discredits any future development efforts, and saps the motivation for truly impoverished people to do anything more than sit on their butts watching Akon music videos on their iPhones and wait for the next SUV full of white people handing out presents.

What the Humanitarian-Industrial Complex doesn’t seem to grasp is that if there is ever going to be sustainable economic growth on the village level, it has to be done without massive infusions of Western capital; in fact, if an economic development project requires the investment of foreign capital, it is going to end once the money dries up and is therefore almost certainly unsustainable in the long run. One guy with a cousin who works high up in the national bank might somehow be able to land enough cash to buy a tractor, but mechanized farming equipment is still much too expensive to serve any foreseeable benefit to the masses with no savings, no landed property to secure vast sums of credit and no connections to defy the natural laws of capitalism. The only way that truly sustainable economic growth is going to occur on the village level is if Malians adopt methods of augmenting their own gardens’ yields with technologies so cheap that they are practically if not one hundred percent free, simple technologies that they can assemble themselves, technologies that are literally too small to fail.

Often when I am walking through my village’s filthy, disgusting, sewage-filled streets, I think of how "underdevelopment" is just a fancy way of saying that resources aren’t being utilized adequately. But this isn’t South Africa or the Congo; there aren’t any valuable mineral resources underneath Sanadougou’s meager soils and sandstone. There really isn’t much to be employed here besides sand, dirt, mud, crumbly rocks and sunlight. Hell, this economy is suffering because water is scarce…

I also think of the profound dilemmas of sustainable development while I’m micturating, stircumating and taking bucket baths in my nyegen. I wonder what of economic value there could possibly be here that Malians aren’t already capitalizing upon…

After such profound thinking sessions, one of the first things I see when I exit my nyegen is my soak pit – still purposefully unfinished – and one of my four papaya trees. They have become such fixtures of my everyday life that I don’t really give them much thought. But after a while I started to notice something…

Way back in November of 2008 after the late James Brown I's inspirational urination and my digging of Sanadougou’s first ever soak pit, the adjacent papaya tree wasn’t much to sneeze at. It was a wimpy, pathetic looking thing.



But a year later, after 12 months of my peeing and bathing and washing all my urine away into that soak pit, something breathtaking has occurred – that wimpy-looking papaya has blossomed into the most prolific fruit tree in my entire garden!



It is the most magnificent papaya tree in all of Sanadougou!



It is full with more than 30 football-sized fruits!



When I’m toiling away in my garden, the neighbors walk by and marvel at the papaya tree and wonder how it is that I make it bloom so. They assume that I went to the city and bought sacks of “Tubabu fertilizer”, because it is well-known in this country teeming with livestock manure that white people are known to spend exorbitant amounts of money on imported, factory-produced chemicals to fertilize their gardens.

“Well, I water it just the same as the other papaya trees, and I don’t feed it with any more cow poop than the other papayas. The only difference that could explain this one papaya’s great fruits is the fact that it is planted right next to my soak pit, so all of the sewage from my nyegen just happens to flow underground directly towards the papaya’s tap roots. It must be the economical reuse of my own wastewater that is reaping Allah’s blessings upon my garden!”

“Your papayas are dirty!” some neighbors say “Do not eat them!”

Au contraire, my nyegen-fueled fruit is perfectly safe and perfectly delicious! There are few things more rewarding than slurping the flesh of a juicy ripe papaya and knowing that the fruit which I am eating was fertilized with my very own urine.


Out of all seriousness, the use of human urine as fertilizer is a wonderfully efficient and absolutely cheap means of increasing the yields of most garden crops. Many individuals might have religious scruples about fertilizing food for human consumption with human waste, many more might be repelled by the “yuck” factor because it almost sounds like humans are directly consuming their own sewage and all of the pathogens associated with it. But that’s not the case – only intermediary plants are consuming the valuable nutrients which urine contains, so these nutrients are simply being recycled. When you think about it, there really isn’t any substantive difference between using human waste and the waste of other animals as fertilizer – there are minor variations in the chemical content of the excreta of different species and especially depending on their own food consumption, but excess nitrogen passed through homo sapiens is no different than that passed through a cow or a sheep.

The most significant matter to consider when choosing between fertilizers is the N-P-K ratio: the relative proportions between nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium contained in the mixture. The reason why chicken manure is such a more productive fertilizer than the manure of other farm animals is because chickens don’t separate solid and liquid waste through a urethra and rectum – birds dispose of it all at once in one N-P-K-rich smattering with one multipurpose cloacae. Compared to human feces, human liquid waste is remarkably richer in all three nutrients – especially nitrogen. In different proportions, the urine of all mammals is more nutrient rich than their feces. The only reason why animals feces are used exclusively for traditional fertilizer and not animal urine is that it is very easy to send a boy out with a bucket to collect cow poop days after the cows have grazed over a particular field – though to collect livestock urine would either require training those same cattle to pee in a bucket, or for that boy to wait underneath the bovine nether-regions in anticipation of those valuable showers of gold.

We humans, however, have over millions of years of evolution developed the ability to control our bodily functions with behaviors conducive to avoiding disease and enhancing food supplies. Not just agriculture but also sanitation is one of the hallmarks of an advanced civilization. The Bambara people have on their own initiative pieced together mud and sticks for the basic nyegen technology which contains fecal matter underground and disposes of liquid waste out into the village streets. My introduction of more sanitary concrete platforms and soak pits is a significant improvement of their pre-existing technology in so far as further reducing human exposure to dangerous pathogens; however, unless everyone in Sanadougou plants their gardens directly adjacent to their soak pits, even this sanitary infrastructure is a tremendous waste of valuable nutrients which could be used to improve the yields of their fruits and vegetables.

The next step in improving Minianka society's waste management practices is to promote an appropriate technology which renders human urine into a usable, portable fertilizer that can easily be transported to the nearest garden. Merely walking out to the cabbage patch and taking a whiz doesn’t suffice because undiluted urine is so acidic that it is harmful to most plants, and moreover, peeing all over cabbage significantly reduces its desirability to potential customers at market.

I invested 4,500 CFA (~$9) worth of plastic and rubber sold in Sanadougou’s weekly market and made a simple contraption which changes the whole equation. I took a 20-liter plastic gasoline drum and spent a week cleaning and treating it extensively so that it is so antiseptic that I could store drinking water inside it. I filled the drum with 4 liters of water and marked off the water line so that I could know when it was 1/5 full. Then I took a plastic funnel and fastened it to the drum’s opening with sliced-up motorcycle tire inner tubes. With this, I could now pee into this plastic drum and store it with ease.

However, my urine storage tank was still incomplete. What makes urine fertilizer so effective is its rich nitrogen content, but if urine is exposed to the air then most of the nitrogen will escape in gaseous form. So I took five sturdy plastic bags, placed them inside one another and filled the inner-most bag with water so that they would seal the opening of the funnel.



Now when I have to go #1, I just simply aim for this funnel instead of the ground-level aperture of my nyegen. It is no extra hassle – if anything, it’s more convenient because there is less of a risk of splash-back for those of us men with superb aim. Though do not think that urine fertilizer is a technology limited to those endowed with dexterous urine-aiming devices – numerous phallicly-challenged Peace Corps Volunteers have overcome their disadvantage by peeing into a cup and then pouring the contents down into their urine storage tank up to the 4-liter mark.

Then I fill the urine storage tank almost all the way to the 20-liter mark in order to fully dilute the urine so that its pH is acceptable to the plants in my garden. It is important to let this mixture sit for a good length of time so that the urine and water are evenly distributed. And then I use the nyegen like normal for the next three days until application.

The use of human urine as fertilizer is much less of a health risk than using untreated human feces, which can transmit giardia, dysentery, hookworm, roundworm, etc. if applied directly to garden crops and is therefore quite dangerous to the gardener and as well as those who consume their fruits or vegetable. Pure urine, on the other hand, is so acidic that bacteria cannot live very long in it; it is so sterile that in extreme situations where freshwater is inaccessible humans should drink their own urine. The only disease that one should really worry about transmitting via urine fertilizer is schistosomiasis, and for this reason after reaching the 4-liter mark I let my liquid gold sit for at least two if not three days before application. The logic behind this is that schistosomiasis is a disease transmitted by infected persons urinating in bodies of water where other people are bathing or swimming; if an infected person were to directly apply their urine fertilizer in, say, an extra-large banana furrow, the schistosomiasis cercariae could penetrate the skin of another gardener working in that banana furrow later that day. But if the water-borne parasites do not find another carrier within 48 hours of their initial urination into a body of water, they die. If I wait until the third day until applying, urine fertilizer is perfectly safe.

There must be a structured means of applying urine fertilizer as well. It must be applied directly to the soil as close to the roots as possible so as to avoid potential contamination of the edible fruits and vegetables, and so the acidic urine does not damage the plant itself. Directly after application, each recipient plant should be irrigated extensively to ensure that the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium percolate down into the soil. One should apply only modest amounts fairly evenly amongst all plants, and to alternate fertilization with many non-fertilized irrigations so as not to overload the soil.

This practice is good for most garden crops; I use it for my papayas, guavas, oranges, lemons, bananas, zucchini and butternut squash – all of which have grown tremendously since I began this practice. Urine fertilizer is especially effective on crops which respond to nitrogen levels such as lettuce and cabbage – though with vegetables which are usually eaten raw in salad one must be particularly careful to not splash any diluted pee on the plant itself. There are only a few crops that should not be applied with urine fertilizer, most obviously nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peanuts, and also rice because paddies are usually flooded with water and those cultivating it would have to wade through potentially schistosomiasis-carrying urine.

The end result is that gardens fertilized with diluted urine can see dramatic multiplications in output. Finnish agricultural chemists found that tomatoes fed with urine fertilizer saw 4.2 times as much yield as the control samples, and calculated that the urine produced by one average adult in one year contains enough nutrients to increase a cabbage crop by 160 cabbages (141 pounds) more than a cabbage crop fertilized with standard commercial fertilizer. And the intensity of urine fertilization has profound effects as well; all of my papaya trees are fertilized with urine – but the one directly adjacent to my soak pit has such a reliable daily stream of nutrients that it has borne 6 times as many fruit (and much larger fruit) than those that have been only mildly fertilized.

The potential of urine fertilizer to jump-start Mali’s gardens and its stagnant village economy is enormous. If a small gardener here were to multiply their tomato yield 4-fold or their papaya yield 6-fold, if they grow an additional 160 heads of cabbage (141 pounds) in one gardening season, they could augment their family’s nutritional intake accordingly. And if they can’t consume an extra 160 heads of cabbage, well, let’s just say that that’s more cabbage than what is sold in Sanadougou’s market over the course of an entire year. Even if just a handful of gardeners in my village were to take urine fertilization to their own plots, it could significantly expand their yields, increase these farmers’ incomes, maybe even lower the price of fruits and vegetables to such an extent that they could become a more regular addition to Malians’ carbohydrate-based diet and improve the health of this entire malnourished society. And the practice of urine fertilization doesn’t require anyone to take out any loans, it doesn’t require some NGO to swoop in and build some overly complicated contraption – all that it requires is the purchase of $9 worth of plastic and rubber, the construction of a nifty little urine storage tank, and for gardeners to pee in it.

If that's not sustainable development on the organic village level, I don't know what is.

My Augean Stables

In previous episodes of this adventure serial, our hero was inspired by his kitty cat digging cat holes in his litter box to dig a big deep hole in back of his nyegen. The American reader who has lived all of his or her life micturating and stircumating into a porcelain toilet flowing into a septic tank or a municipal sewer system might not understand the import of this action, but as a brief primer let me introduce you to the mechanics of a pit latrine.


First, I must emphasize the not-so-obvious reality that in some parts of the world a pit latrine is considered newfangled technology. In the year 2009 there remain many societies in which few people have bothered to build any sort of infrastructure to dispose of human waste in a sanitary matter. What that means is that everyone in a small village poops in the woods, in the fields, or on certain designated rocks or directly into the water. In more densely populated towns and cities, that means that people just pull down their pants and shit in the street where other people are selling and selling food. Oftentimes if a society lacking in sanitation infrastructure is located near a pond, a lake, a stream or a river, that means that everyone in this rural society disposes of their solid and liquid waste in the very same body of water which also serves as either their own or another human community's sole supply of drinking water - putting that society at grave risk of cholera outbreaks. This is the absolute nadir of public sanitation.

There are other cultures which have collectively decided that defecation out in the open, in and near water and food supplies is a hazard to public health if not humiliating to everyone in that society. And so they have developed their sanitation practices somewhat and built designated areas which are reserved exclusively for the depositing of feces and urine. In the Bambara and Minianka cultures of Mali families often build their own structure known as a bokeyuro – euphemistically, a “traditional nyegen”, but literally, a “pooping place”. It is what it sounds like; an area demarcated by a mud brick wall inside which people poop. The chief advantages of a bokeyuro over open defecation are that 1) fecal matter is controlled to some degree – people are no longer shitting all over the place, but rather in one place; 2) it spares its users the indignity of shitting in the street for all the world to see. The primary disadvantage of having everyone in a family of 35 shitting in one place is that it very quickly becomes full of shit – and a concentrated smorgasbord for filth flies, cockroaches, pigs and every disease vector which enjoys eating human feces.

The bokeyuro and its close relative, the sugunyekeyuro – “peeing place” – are not confined to undeveloped rural villages; I have been to a number of sketchy bars and restaurants in densely-populated urban areas where – upon asking for the nyegen – I have been shown to a seemingly empty room. Seeing no toilet seat, no urinal, no chamber pot or even a hole in the ground, I was at first confused as to what I was supposed to do. But after noticing a foul-smelling puddle on the floor it became quite apparent that the standard protocol in this establishment was to just do as one likes so long as it’s confined to this one closed container – and to leave the mess for someone else to clean up. The only aspect of a “traditional nyegen” which could be fairly called a virtue is that at least no one can see the user as they suffer the indignity of using it.

After many generations of building and managing “traditional nyegens”, proprietors of bokeyuros became disillusioned with the fact that they had to sweep up floors full of shit and piss every day. And so they discovered that if you dig a hole in that designated shitting place and bury a clay pot up to its brim, the pot fills up more slowly and one does not have to sweep up shit so often, and moreover the chamber pot can be closed with a lid. Eventually this semi-buried chamber pot evolved into what is known as a “pit latrine”, which is exactly what it sounds like – a hole in the ground on top of which people squat and poop, though a hole which leads to an underground pit which is so voluminous that it can store many months if not multiple years’ worth of fecal matter. Due to the fact that the shit is safely stored underground, a pit latrine is the simplest technology to contain and concentrate human solid waste in order to reduce fecal-oral disease transmission. In Mali the pit latrine is called a nyegen, and especially in rural villages a nyegen is more often than not constructed out of logs, dried mud and mud bricks.




Though a major step up from open defecation, a "traditional nyegen" has many faults to its design. The first and most significant is that the vast majority of nyegens are built out of mud - which is a perfectly adequate construction material so long as you don’t mind seeing your nyegen disintegrate under the heavy rains and having to rebuild it all over again every year. When I was living in Sinsina last rainy season I woke up during a torrential downpour one night and came out with my raincoat and headlamp prepared for a nocturnal stircumation - when I realized that the nyegen which I had struggled so hard learning to use over the past month had collapsed into the pit. It wasn’t a very fun night.

Most nyegens are not closed properly - if at all. Just as all of that fecal matter is concentrated in one place, so is the stench – and all of the insects and vermin which are attracted by it. And if flies are feasting upon human waste, they can transmit those pathogens equally well if they are from waste on top of a soccer field, the central market square or from inside an unclosed nyegen.

Pit latrines without proper coverings are also hazardous to small house pets. One Peace Corps Volunteer who failed to properly cover her nyegen suffered the fate of curious kitten peering into the hole and falling into the pit. She tried hoisting down a bucket, but the kitten could not be made to understand that it was supposed to climb in. Every time that the Volunteer crouched down over the hole she would hear her kitten mewing – and she knew that she was peeing all over it – until the mews became weaker and weaker and the poor critter eventually died of starvation.

Moreover, the greatest weakness of a latrine is that the latrine pit is ultimately going to fill up without some sort of outlet. This does not necessarily have to happen, for if a given latrine is seldom used and it also serves as a food source for a considerable population of worms, flies, cockroaches and dung beetles, the mass of the pit’s contents could technically decompose faster than it accumulates. But more often than not it is the other way around. Even a latrine pit is used only for the disposal of solid waste, eventually there is going to be a big stinking mass of human feces and someone has to perform the unenviable task of jumping into that latrine pit and shoveling out its contents. This job is so objectionable and yet so necessary in a society with pit latrines that Indian civilization created an entire caste of persons – the Dalits – who are born to the foul and dangerous occupation of shoveling other people’s shit.

Latrine pits fill up particularly fast if they are misused for the disposal of wastewaters which stifle aerobic decomposition and turn the nyegen into a stinking cesspool which serves as a breeding ground for pathogens, is never going to evaporate, and is difficult to remove. It’s most likely no big deal if a little bit of pee trickles into the poop pit because while squatting you had to #1 and #2 at the same time; it only becomes a problem if this happens to a great extent on a regular basis. What’s really bad is if a family dumps their average weekly 1,600 liters of greywater produced from washing persons, dishes and clothing into the latrine pit – in which case it is going to fill up in no time at all.

One means of significantly reducing the quantity of mass inside a latrine pit and requiring less-frequent shoveling sessions is to separate the solid waste from the liquid waste. Malian cultures which developed mud nyegens found this out pretty quickly, which is why just about every nyegen in this country is made with a second hole on the bottom of one of the mud brick walls which allows wastewater to flow out. These outflow holes work just fine in terms of reducing unpleasant latrine-emptying labor. However, simple outflow holes kind of defeat the entire purpose of containing disease-spreading pathogens, for even if the squatting hole is aptly closed there is now raw, untreated sewage lying in the open where it is accessible to every species of disease vector known to mankind.


Some families - especially those who live in the outskirts of town next to their fields and gardens -simply place their nyegen in a remote corner of their concession so that their wastewater can flow out to a lightly-trafficked part of their living space. My host family’s nyegen water empties out in back of their house where no one has to see or smell it. The agglomerate of mud and sewage which has been generated in back of the nyegen after years of use also serves as their pigs’ favorite location for recreation, so every time the mucky sow and her piglets trot by we get a whiff of general nastiness (this is also serves as a prime reason to never eat pork in this country).


Though when I walk into the center of town where the concessions are closer together and there is no field or garden into which the wastewater can flow out, every family’s greywater and urine flows directly into the street where everybody walks, their children play and their animals roam. To say that the streets of Sanadougou are "foul" or “disgusting” would be a gross understatement.

On a typical day when I have to walk to the center of town and buy some sugar at the butigi, this is what the streets look like:


If you’ve never before lived in Mali or a similar underdeveloped country, you might be wondering: “What the Hell are those big crater-looking things on either side of the road?” Those, my friends, are puddles of human liquid waste.


Ewwwwwwww....


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww....


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.....

Sometimes people will dig a little hole to “contain” their wastewater so that instead of spilling all over the street it sits in a relatively smaller, fetid and actually more hazardous cesspool.


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwyuckkkkkkkkkwwwwwwwwww….


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwgrossssssswwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww…
Oftentimes people use their wastewater ditches for garbage disposal too.


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwrrrrrretttttttcchhhhhhhhhgagggggggggggggggggggggg…


Some of these nasty puddles are really, really big. Karitie Sanogo stands in the background for perspective.


Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww......

Even my Minianka neighbors who believe that diseases come from wizards and evil spirits understand that these wastewater puddles are really, really bad because they serve as breeding grounds for filth flies and mosquitoes. They believe that the wizards turn into flies and buzz over to place their curses in other people’s food. The Miniankas are like ¾ of the way there…


The worst part about standing wastewater is that it threatens the health of everyone in the community – not just those who produced this uncontained pee and greywater. Let’s say that the Sogoba family is currently sharing a really bad case of amoebic dysentery; most of their diarrhea fell down into the nyegen pit, but little Bakary missed the hole and splattered all over the floor and so his mother washed the floor down with water and it flowed out the drainage hole into the street. A female filth fly is hungry and thirsty, so she sticks her proboscis into the Traorés’ effluent of human waste – while she’s at it, she will stick her front two legs into the water and pick up whatever unicellular amoeba have been previously evacuated by the Traoré family.

Let’s say the Dembele family does everything right; they get their drinking water from the hand pump in the village square, they filter their water and treat it with chlorine bleach, they wash their hands with soap after going to the bathroom and before eating. As the family gathers around the communal food bowl for dinner, the female fly which was just drinking from the Traorés’ cesspool swoops down and lands in the Dembeles’ tigadegana. Now the Dembele’s peanut butter sauce is spiced with a dash of Bakary Traoré’s diarrhea with a few young amoebas to boot. Now the Traorés and the Dembeles all have amoebic dysentery! This is why improving sanitation on the household level alone does not suffice to improve a family’s health – sanitation campaigns must be conducted on the community scale.

So this is where I, Zachary Mason a.k.a. Madu Sogoba, Peace Corps Volunteer, come into the picture. Before anything else, after being roused into action by the hardest-working man in the sanitation business, my kitty cat of soul James Brown, I took the initiative of spending a week in back of my nyegen digging a big fat hole. As this was the first time that anyone in Sanadougou had ever seen a white person doing manual labor, the week that I dug that hole behind my nyegen was a major spectacle.

However, what sets the hole in back of my nyegen apart from the couple-inch craters which my neighbors have made to create stinking cesspools of slime is that there’s a more planning and a little bit of industrial-age materials involved in my creation.

What I have made here is the pinnacle of water sanitation technology appropriate for a rural Malian village: a soak pit - or in the local vernacular, a wuluwuludinge. Instead of any old hole, it’s a hole filled with rocks with a plastic tube leading from the outflow hole in the nyegen. It’s not quite finished - but that’s the point; over time I’m going to fill it completely with more rocks, cover it with sturdy black plastic, line the plastic tube with cement, and cover the entire thing up with mud so that looks no less wholesome than the rest of my garden. But in the meantime it serves as an excellent teaching tool for all of the people who walk by and ask me “what the Hell is that?” I invite all of the curious onlookers into my concession to inspect my new wuluwuludinge, show them what its purpose is and how it works, and offer to help them build one behind their own nyegen(s).

A soak pit really isn’t all that complicated. The purpose of this contraption is to thoroughly contain human wastewater so that it flows directly underground with absolute minimal interaction between other humans, livestock, and disease-transmitting insects. If one were to put a plastic pipe directly between the nyegen and the ground without a storage cavity, the water would not be able to seep quickly enough into the soil. Thus a soak pit serves as rudimentary septic tank; the first thing that it does is provide sufficient volume for the wastewater produced by a given family to sit in a contained location, and as the wastewater sits there, donné donné it will seep into the soil surrounding it. The pit should be filled not with concrete rubble or mud bricks but only with sedimentary rocks which can be permeated with water and still maintain their form. And every couple of years the owner of a soak pit should open it up, let the rocks out in the sun for a day to dry and clean them off so that they remain permeable.

My water sanitation how-to books say that soak pits can also be built in rural villages with indigenous materials; if there is bamboo available it can be hallowed to serve the same function as the plastic pipe, and then instead of plastic sheeting the hole can be covered with straw, corn husks or leaves. If available locally, bamboo and agricultural refuse is available, these materials could be economically-preferable to plastic piping and sheeting because it can be absolutely free of charge; however, organic materials eventually rot and need to be replaced – whereas plastic is relatively durable.

So not only am I teaching people about the merits and joys of soak pits – I’m also in the process of organizing a project to build a preliminary stage of 30 of these babies throughout the village of Sanadougou. The scheme Peace Corps has for project funding is that the local community has to pay at least 30 percent of the total project cost (which can be paid in raw materials, tools and services as well as cash) and USAID funds up to 70 percent. I had a series of meetings with my boss, the dugutigi of Sanadougou and his posse of old men and le Bureau de la Mairie, and we worked out a deal that if individual families can provide for all of the rocks, sand, and either pay for or provide in-kind all of the skilled and unskilled labor that goes into the making of a soak pit, then the American people will chip in for all of the plastic piping and sheeting.

What’s more, we’re going to throw in a brand new, cement-floored nyegen! One can certainly build a soak pit in back of a traditional Malian mud nyegen, but when the rains come all of that mud on the floor is going to rapidly fill up the pit and clog the pipe. There are about a dozen latrines in this village made with at least cement floors, and for those all that we need to do is make sure there’s a cover over the hole and dig a soak pit in the back and its disease-transmitting days are effectively over. But if we’re going to build a soak pit in back of Sanadougou’s more numerous mud nyegens we are going to have to remake the flooring with cement if not rebuild the nyegen from scratch.

And thus my job nowadays entails walking down Sanadougou's filthy streets, stopping to chat with my fellow villagers and talking to them about their nyegens and wastewater, to measure the dimensions of what needs to be dug, and let them know about an offer they can't refuse: you get off your butt and provide the labor, rocks and sand, and then the American people will provide you with $80 worth of cement, rebar and plastic and we're going to build a brand new cement nyegen which they'll never have to rebuild it again. There will be no sewage spewing out into the streets, filth flies and mosquitoes will have less stagnant water to lay their eggs in, and maybe just maybe pathogens will be reduced to such an extent that you will be able to discern a measurable improvement in their families' health. I think that's a pretty good deal.

After 8 weeks of canvassing and meeting with dozens upon dozens of families, however, results have been quite underwhelming. One guy down the street has dug 3 holes and filled 2 of them with rocks, another guy on my street has accumulated a pile of rocks in front of his nyegen, and after shaming them into action my host brothers have made a half-assed effort at digging a hole. A lot of people seem to be completely indifferent to the fact that their children are playing in, their livestock are drinking from, and they are inevitably ingesting their own and other people's wastewater.

I was trying to persuade one family which just so happens to supplement their farming income with a "pharmacy"; a mud hovel with bootleg Chinese manufactured medications which are in all likelihood nothing but sugar pills. They also have among the worst, most disgusting cesspools in the entire village (their twin nyegenji puddles are pictured above). Time and time again they would laugh me off, "Oh Tubabuke, don't you see that we have so many better things to do like drinking tea and selling medicine?"

They didn't even give me direct eye contact until I started talking dollars and cents. Walking by one day I mentioned to the pharmacist "I've got a headache and I would really like to buy some medicine - but I'm going to buy my pills from the other pharmacist down the street because his sewage isn't spilling out into the street and so his medicine is probably a lot cleaner". As I continued along my way I could hear the gears churning in his head...

Despite the lack of worldly-physical action, in spirit everyone seems to be behind me. I'm told every day "May Allah help you in your good work!"

"Allah-u-akbar; however, He's not going to clean up our village. But you can give me a hand..."

Human Sanitation with Feline Inspiration

So I woke up one morning and let my kitten out to pee and set up my solar panel to bask in the rising Sun. Usually I start my days walking down the street greeting everyone in my village and try to get them excited about treating their wells and drinking water. But today I just felt like venting to my kitten.

“James Brown, what’s the point of it all? The people of Sanadougou tell the Peace Corps that they want me to help them with water sanitation, I spend all day teaching people about water-borne disease prevention and they don’t do a damn thing I tell them! Every day I tell people they should drink pump water instead of well water and how they should filter their drinking water with cloth and treat it with bleach and yet they continue to drink worm-infested well water because they say that it tastes better than pump water!!! And I know that they’re not doing anything differently because at night I can smell all the gaseous sulfur from the aggregate diarrhea of everyone in this village! Why do I do this?!?! Why am I here?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?!

James Brown replied, “Get a grip on yo self Madu! You gotta understand! The Bambara people have been living like this for thousands of years! Almost nuthin changes! You been here six months, and you frustrated cuz you ain’t changed nuthin yet? Take a chill pill!!! You gotta learn patience!!!

“You got a point there James. But I don’t understand how people who tell me every day how sick they are and how poor they are can be so resistant to change. It’s just absurd.”

“Put yourself in their position! You’re a Bambara peanut farmer, dig? And some white dude from the suburbs waltzes into your village and tells you you’re doing everything wrong! This honky tells you that diseases come from tiny animals that you’ve never seen! Then he starts tellin’ you that wizards ain’t real! You’d think that punk be talkin' Jive! You'd say ‘screw you, honky!’ You wouldn’t do a damn thing different!”

“But what am I supposed to do? Stop trying to teach people about giardia and amoebas?”

Al – my solar panel – chimed in. “No, Zachary, I would advise that you continue on your current course of action despite its lack of easily measurable achievement. For example, the other day Moustapha told you that he treated his well with liquid bleach like you told him to. I would consider that a success unto itself.”

“C’mon, Al, Moustapha is just one person! There are like 4,427 other people in this village! At this rate they’ll all be treating their drinking water in the year 6224!”

“I would not be so pessimistic, Zachary. When I presided over the first Senate hearings on global warming in 1988 I was received with such skepticism that I was practically laughed out of the committee chamber, for at the time this phenomenon was understood almost exclusively within the academic community. In my 1993 environmental treatise Earth in the Balance I explained the climatological science in relative layman’s terms, and my message reached a substantially larger audience. But it was not until 2006 when I produced and narrated the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth that public opinion was so roused in favor of a national campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and only now in the year 2009 does it look like public opinion has shifted to such a degree that the cap-and-trade program which I have advocated has a chance of passing both houses of Congress.”

“Al, you lost me. What does global warming have to do with diarrhea?”

“Actually, the two phenomena are not mutually exclusive, for methane actually constitutes one of the most significant biogenic greenhouse gases – and the amount of methane released by the human digestive system actually spikes due to cases of giardiasis and amoebic dysentery. If we could provide potable water supplies to the population of roughly 2 billion persons currently lacking, then that could make a consequential reduction in the annual tonnage of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. However, the point of my analogy between my campaign for sensible climate policy and your campaign for improved water sanitation practices is that you should look into trying new forms of media to broadcast your message to a wider audience. For example, I used cinema and the Internet...”

“No, Al, this has nothing to do with the Internet. The people in my village ooh and ah when I show them how the velcro on my sandals works. Three people in the Mayor’s Office know how to type birth certificates on a typewriter. Just forget about the Internet! If I am going to teach people anything about water sanitation and for them to actually do it themselves it has to be simple enough for a toothless, illiterate peanut farmer to understand. It has to be so simple and so obvious that they can see it for themselves with their own eyes. If it entails concepts that I learned in 9th grade Biology class then it is too complicated.”

“’Scuse me, fellas! I gotta take a pee!”

“You’re excused, James.”

James Brown proceeded to dig a little hole in the sand with his front paws, urinated, and then moved forward and with his back paws pawed sand back on top of his pee hole.

“James, what did you just do?”

“Nuthin! I just got to pee! And when I got to pee I got to dig a hole!”

“I know you dug a hole, but why?”

“I don’t know! I… I… I just got to pee! Every time I got to pee I got to dig a hole! That’s just the way it is!”

Al lectured, “The common house cat covers up its own liquid and solid waste because of its instincts as a carnivorous animal. The scent of feline urine is particularly strong due to its high concentration of urea relative to water and is used among the wild cat population to mark one’s territory; however, potential prey have over millions of generations learned to avoid areas marked by the scent of cat urine. Over time, cats began to realize this as wekk and hence they have likewise developed the instinctive behavior to bury their waste so as to hide the scent.”

“THAT’S IT!!! We need to build a network of rudimentary septic tanks!!! James Brown, you’re the most ingenious talking cat ever!!!”

“Damn straight! They don’t call me the Kitty Cat of Soul for Nuthin!”

So I emulated the ingenious water sanitation infrastructure designed by my kitten and began to build a soak pit. I went out in the back of my nyegen where the wastewater flows out into the garden and plotted out a hole. A soak pit should have a minimum of 1.7 m2 of volume for each person who uses it on an average day, and since I am the only person who lives in the mud mansion of Xanadu that meant that I had to dig a hole roughly 1.2 meters long, 1.2 meters wide, and 1 meter deep. Easy, right?


No. In the midst of dry season – six months since the last rainfall – the dirt is as hard as a rock. Before digging anything I had to take a pickax and smash the ground apart. But even a pickax alone did not do the trick – after smashing the ground for an hour, I would have maybe a couple centimeters of debris to excavate. It was a little easier if I dumped a bucket of water on it at night and came to smash the moistened dirt in the morning, but the water would only moisten about 5 cm below the surface each time. Eventually I was able to sit in my pit and use the ax head to chisel the walls flat. Never was I able to produce enough debris to fill a single shovel – I could only dig this pit with a small garden spade.

The most fascinating aspect of me digging a hole was… that it was so goddamn fascinating. Rumor quickly spread around the village; “Did you hear that Madu is digging a hole?” “Praise be unto Allah! This is the first time since he’s gotten off his fat bobaraba since he got here!” And unless you have been the only white guy living in an African village you’d never believe it, but pretty soon there was a crowd of people gathering around to watch me. Only to a people who enjoy watching shitty Brazilian soap operas dubbed into another Western language they don’t understand could this actually be entertaining. “Holy Goat Meat! Madu is digging a hole! I’ve never seen anything like it!” This actually made my work go significantly slower because every 15 minutes I had to stop and explain what I was doing “Well you see, I’m digging a hole…”

What was actually kind of encouraging is another phenomenon kind of like Tom Sawyer whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence – if you start a project out in public, other people want to finish it for you. Ten year old kids would point out that in comparison to their fathers’ thick, calloused hands hardened after decades of hard labor in the fields, my hands have the soft and delicate skin of an American who has worked in offices clicking buttons all of his life. “You can’t dig a hole!” “You should sit and rest!” and they would try to take the pickax from my hands and do it for me. After having my manhood called into question by ten year olds, I had to lock my gate so they could only watch from outside.

After two weeks of picking and chiseling downward I eventually I dug my 1.7 m2.

And me digging this hole seems to have done its job. Pretty soon everyone knew that I had a hole in back of my nyegen. Word eventually got around to the dugutigi, so he and his crew of old men came to inspect my hole. They thought that it was so awesome that they wanted one in back of every last nyegen in the village, and I was summoned to the gwa of the elders.

(dum dum DUUUUUUM!!!! To be continued!!!!!!)