Help Fund Pilar's Nyegen Project!

Though the eponymous hero of this blog can no longer volunteer his own ditch–digging skills, the brave activists of Operation Sphincter Plug continue their valiant effort to rid the world of gastrointestinal disease. Continuing this imperative work in another village down the road from Sanadougou is Peace Corps Volunteer Pilar Lyons of Pine Bush, New York. Pilar is a civil engineer with a special zeal for water and wastewater infrastructure!

Pilar’s village is much smaller than Sanadougou – only about one thousand people; however, it has even more dire sanitation needs. This particular Minianka village lies atop soft fertile soils adjacent to a series of seasonal ponds with a very high water table – only 1.5 meters below ground in some places. Though this is a prime location for agriculture, since the water table is so high and the soft soils are not supported by solid rock, their “traditional latrines” built from mud and logs often rot and collapse while some unlucky person is squatting on top of them. Even worse, the high water table and soft soils mean that the groundwater which feeds this village's wells is particularly susceptible to contamination from the unlined latrine pits; in other words, their drinking water is directly polluted with human fecal matter. Without any means of containing wastewater, raw sewage flows out into standing puddles in the street which serve as fertile breeding grounds for malaria-spreading mosquitoes, as well as filth flies and cockroaches which carry giardia cysts and amoebas into the people's food and drinking water.

Inadequate sanitation in a Minianka village is not just something icky – it is the reason why giardia, dysentery, hookworm and malaria are absolutely endemic in this society, it why two out of every five children die before the age of five, it is why so many adults cannot work in the fields because they are sapped and emaciated by dysentery. Without the monetary wealth to purchase reinforced concrete and plastic tubing necessay to build adequate sanitation infrastructure, these poor Miniankas are mired in a cycle of filth, disease and poverty.

A few months before I packed my bags for Ameriki, Pilar biked over to the mud mansion of Xanadu with two masons from her village both named Daniel Dembele. They came to inspect the many dozens of nyegens and soak pits we had built throughout town. My main man Sidiki Sogoba taught the two Daniels how he assembles proper latrine platforms so that they could apply this trade in their own community. Sidiki doesn't mind the competition, because "We need so many skilled masons in every village in Mali. Even near Sanadougou, we need so much work that I could never do it all."



Now Pilar and the two Daniel Dembele’s are committed to organizing a village–wide sanitation campaign similar to the one which Sidiki and I conducted in Sanadougou. With your help, they would like to build 30 concrete latrines with lined latrine pits to safely store solid waste and a combintion of soak pits and infiltration trenches to safely store liquid waste underground in such a way that it does not directly contaminate the groundwater and it cannot be spread by flies and vermin to indirectly contaminate the food and water. The villagers who would like to participate in the program will have to procure all of the sand, rocks and gravel and either contribute or pay for all of the necessary labor; 27 percent of the total cost. Funds donated through the Peace Corps Partnership will go to pay for cement, rebar, plastic pipes, plastic sheets and a few masonry tools which the town does not have at their disposal.

If you would like to contribute to Pilar’s nyegen project, click here!

Ini’che kosibe kosibe!!!

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.

Something Constructive

This is the first well we've built in all of Sanadougou.



I couldn't have done it alone.

Pool Patrol: Mali

Thankfully over the course of my three glorious summers at Oakridge Condominiums not once did I ever have to utilize my rigorous training in lifesaving skills. For the most part my First Aid was only applied to superficial knee scrapes and bee stings. The most serious emergency I ever had to respond to was this one time a severely autistic kid decided to see how far he could stick his hand into the wading pool filter and of course he could stick his hand all the way in but he couldn’t pull it back out. Replying to his cries I sprinted to the pump room, I pulled the levers to turn off the filter suction, drained the pool, and not knowing what else to do I called the Vista Fire Department conveniently located across the street. Within 60 seconds my fellow 12-graders Nate Vass and Wyatt Lansdale – Volunteer Firefighters – drove the fire truck down with the siren blaring, strutted across the pool deck in their full firefighting suits and were quite amused by this dire situation. Nate pulled the plastic filter entirely out of the concrete pool deck, and while he held the screaming, frantic kid’s hand in place Wyatt took out a small buzz saw and cut the filter in half. The child’s hand was unharmed, but I applied a Band-Aid to calm him down. Nate and Wyatt received a round of applause. And that was the closest I ever came to saving a life.

… That is, until I joined the Peace Corps.

I had just hours ago introduced my new kitty James Brown II to my lovely mud mansion and the garden of Xanadu. He was busy wandering around the papaya and banana trees, inspecting every square centimeter of his new home. I assume that he enjoyed the tranquility and shade of this living space devoid of cruel, tortuous children and cat-eating humans.

I decided to start irrigating the garden, so I removed the palm fronds which were temporarily serving as a well cover and lowered the Nafosoro pump’s intake hose. Rainy season had just started and Sanadougou had still seen only paltry precipitation to date, so the water tables were still so low that my 7-meter well contained less than a meter of water. I kicked the pedals up and down but before I could even adequately water a single tree my pump sucked up a soggy slurp; it had already hit mud.

I heard a distressing cry beyond the fence – Snoop Doggy Dogg wanted to come and wrestle. So I opened the gate and he started sniffing around and he smelt a new friend! : James Brown II. Snoop wanted to play!

“Word up, brosef! You gonna think this place is dope!!! Let me smell yo ass so we kin have a propa intraducshin…”

James II freaked out! He had never seen anything like this before! So he bolted and ran to the far end of the garden and jumped for cover in what looked like a safe hideaway: the well. After 6.8 meters of silent free fall I heard a splash.

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! James Brown II!!!”

“… Mewwwwww…”

“I am a Lifeguard trained to save you!!! Do you accept my offer of assistance?”

“… Mewwwww…”

“Okay, first thing I am going to do is reduce the volume of water in this well so as to remove you from immediate danger of drowning. Do not worry – help is on the way!!!”

“… Mewwwww?...”

“There was hardly even a single well-bag full of water in there!!! You are going to be just fine!!!”

“… MEWWWW!!!...”

“I’m still here!!! Now James, climb into the well-bag!!! I will hoist you to safety!!!”

“… Mewww…. Mewwwww…”

“James!!! Just climb into the fucking well-bag!!! I am not climbing down there without a proper helmet to ensure my own corporeal safety!!!”

“Mewwww!!!... MewwWWW!!!!”

“What’s that? You’re afraid to get into the well-bag because has neither sufficient volume or structural integrity to hold you without bending? Hold on!!!

“MEWWWWWW!!!”

“I said hold on!!! I just untied the well-bag and replaced it with a 20 liter plastic bucket! It is heavy and dense enough that I can lower it down to the well bottom and it will remain right-side up for you to climb up into it – and then I will hoist you to safety!!! Do you hear me?”

“Mewwwww!!!”

“Alright… good kitty!!! You’re in the bucket so just stay still!!! You’re almost at the surface!!!”

With only 1 meter left before ground level James II jumped up and tried to climb the remainder by the strength of his soggy claws.

“NOOOOOOOO!!!! JAMES!!!!! YOU’VE GOT TO TRUST ME!!!”

“MEWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!”

While James had mere centimeters to go, I dropped belly first onto the now-muddy ground. With my left hand I continued to hold the rope for the bucket right in place beneath him – and with my right hand lunged for a firm grip around James’ collar bone. And I pulled the sopping wet kitten to my chest.



But for a few scrapes to the nose – it seemed like he had jumped face first into the wall of the well – James didn’t seem too hurt. But his fur was soaked, and he was shivering violently. Young kittens are largely incapable of maintaining a steady body temperature – especially when wet. Though it was 90 degrees out, James Brown II was in serious danger of hypothermia.

No matter how hot it was, the danger would remain so long as his coat remained wet and wicked body heat away from his extremities. So I brought him inside and dried him off with my fuzzy towel. Within a few minutes all I could do was continue fluffing his fur until it was bereft of moisture, and James took care of the rest licking with his dry tongue.

“That was a close one, James. You owe me big time – no more jumping in the well.”

“Yeah, and you owe me some formal top-well improvement so that I don’t have the urge to jump down there in the first place! How can I be expected not to do stupid shit? I’m just a cat, dig?”

“Point considered. Now let’s just hope that you spend your other 8 lives at a much slower pace.”