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.

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

November approaches. Operation Sphincter Plug trudges into its second month. It seems as though my campaign to rid Sanadougou of water-borne diarrhea is going to be a long, hard slog. The more I realize that so few people have any means of measuring the depth of their well water with the metric system, I now measure the man of the household’s forearm and tell them to measure their wet rope with the relative unit of “arm-lengths”.

The further I travel into the murky depths of the Malian fecal-oral cycle, the more I realize how incredibly primitive is the system of English units. It is a system intended for people who do not understand the concept of abstract scientific constants. The only reason why I need to teach this very limited system of measuring things in relation to one’s arm is that I am trying to teach well treatment to a largely illiterate population whose grasp of mathematics is more or less confined to counting. In a society where the decimal point is comprehended only by a select elite, this system makes sense. Though it boggles my mind that the United States of America – the most powerful, most wealthy, most technologically-advanced society in the history of human civilization which has split the atom, sent men to the Moon, and decoded the human genome – still measures things in relation to a 12th century English monarch’s foot.

The wide, deep chasm between the material conditions of technological development and the actual understanding of that technology also continues to baffle me. This most directly hits home when I spend each day maintaining the village water pumps – but people would rather drink from their murky wells. Modernism and medievalism coexist like corn and beans.

My favorite case study is that of my new all-time favorite technology: solar pumping. A few years ago a French NGO recognized that during each dry season a significant portion of Sanadougou’s respective herds of cows, donkeys, sheep, goats and pigs would die from dehydration, and that the seasonal water shortage posed an acute problem for this agricultural economy. And so they decided out of the goodness of their hearts to build a solar pump. This fascinating contraption pumps excess groundwater from the rainy season to two storage towers about 20 meters high; during dry season it gradually releases a stream of water into concrete troughs for the farm animals to drink. As the name suggests, the pump and release system is powered by its own array of solar panels programmed to track the Sun’s direct radiation.

The people of my village understand very well that during dry season when the streams and ponds dry up, they should herd their animals to the watering trough. But they apparently don’t really get what those shiny blue metal things are. I realized this when I biked over to inspect the solar pump the first time early one morning to discover that the chain-link fence surrounding the solar array was draped with some lady’s laundry – blocking the most direct of the sun’s rays. I was eventually able to find the owner of the offending laundry and tried my best to explain to her that a solar array is not a very good place to hang her clothes.

“But my dresses and blankets are wet”, she protested. “If I do not put them on the fence, they will not dry.”

It’s not as though the people of Mali are completely sheltered from the outside world. Even in my remote village, everyone gathers around the family television set which shows them images of the Western life of running water, credit cards, the Internet. Imaginations are surely whetted by these general concepts and they really want these great new things, but they have difficulty understanding that progress comes gradually; e.g. that before they can build a swimming pool they should concentrate on treating their drinking water, that before I can teach them to speak English they should focus on the alphabet. History books call this “The Revolution on of Rising Expectations.”

I have come to learn about the boundless optimism of my neighbors very well as I go door to door and ask people about how we can work together on local development. What I have in mind is to building covers on wells and digging pits next to people’s latrines as rudimentary septic tanks.

One old lady says to me, “you should build an airplane.” I thought this was hilarious… until I realized that she wasn’t laughing – she was dead serious.

“If you build an airplane, then we can sell our peanuts in France.”

Trying my best to not be impolite, I asked her who – if I indeed built this airplane - would drive it all the way to Charles de Gaulle International Airport.

“Me”, the shoeless, toothless farmer replied, “I have driven a boat many times.” To understand this statement, in Bambara the word for “airplane” is pankuru – literally “jumping boat.” Every few months the farmers hear a high whistle as they are hoeing their fields, they look up and see this metal thing flying across the horizon. In the logic of the Bambara language, but for the fact that one goes in the water and one goes in the air, a Boeing 747 cannot be fundamentally all that different from a wooden canoe. After all, there is no means of ever knowing, because I can guarantee that the shoeless, toothless farmer with maybe $100 to her name will never ever set foot upon an airplane.

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, especially when this boundless optimism and desire for change is the manna upon which the Peace Corps feeds. But it’s a difficult sell trying to channel this dreamy liberalism into a passion for eradicating diarrhea and cleaning the streets of shit and piss.