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!!!

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.

A Dirty Little Secret

Sanadougou is a religiously diverse society by Malian standards. If asked, about 80 percent of the population would identify as Muslim, 20 percent would call themselves Christian. And in addition to the globally-established creeds to which all Sanadougoukaw will profess, there is a long and proud tradition prior to any of these religions which is truly more fundamental to local spirituality. The Christian pastor in town calls it “une réligion paganiste”, others might object due to the lack of any formal god or gods in this belief system and refer to it as a mere “animist practice”, monotheist chauvinists might impugn it as a mere “fetishist cult”. Whatever it is, the ancient traditions of the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe are not what you would assume to find in a country that considers itself monotheistic.

The first inkling of Bamana tradition I could glean was when I and saw a guys at market selling a strange cornucopia of snake skins, monkey heads, dead parrots and ram horns, etc. At first I thought these wares were mere hunting trophies, but in fact, they were fetishes endowed with spiritual powers. The powers attributed to each individual fetish are generally those attributed to the living animals; e.g. the head of a West African night adder could be channeled to inflict harm upon an enemy, a dog’s paw could augment a woman’s fertility, cowry shells can be used to divine the future and the hair of a white man can aid its holder to find great wealth and love. Devout Muslims and Christians might cite the parable of Ibrahim to condemn such idolatry, but they have to really know who they’re talking to because a lot of people who regularly pray at mosque or church also invoke the power of fetishes in the privacy of their own homes.

When people conduct the Bamana tradition they do not “worship” the fetish, it certainly could not be defined as “polytheism” because they are not “deifying” the late monkey or parrot as something beyond this world. The most proper term to describe this tradition would be “animism”, because they are attributing spiritual properties unto objects of this world. Magic has a great deal to do with it, but the kind of white magic practiced by the likes of Dumbledore and Sabrina Spellman. Whatever you do, don’t call it “witchcraft” – because unlike one who supplicates fetishes for benign magic, a shubaga is one who conjures the fetish spirits and black magic powers for malicious ends.

Though when you see all of these juju skins and claws at market, one cannot help but wonder what happened to the rest of the animal. Usually the fetishtigi gets their hands on their wares by the vagaries of hunters’ success, but every January they are guaranteed a new shipment of inventory after the annual N’yaa ceremony. Like most celebrations in Mali, there were no formal invitations mailed out or even uttered, but those in the know just happen to know. One afternoon last January I heard a hypnotic drumming, balaphone (xylophone) and singing out by the market area; I asked Karitie what the celebration was all about, and he told me “Les paganistes font leur sacrifice!”

“… Quel sort du sacrifice?” I asked.

“Les chiens et les poulets!”

So last year I spent the annual sacrifice ceremony at home guarding my puppy from the clutches of the local witch doctor. But this year I planned in advance and chained Snoop Doggy Dogg up within the confines of my chain-link fence so I could attend without fear. I was told that I probably wouldn’t want to show up until after dinner, because until then full participation in the ceremony is mandatory to all attendees.

Asides from all the singing and dancing, the centerpiece of N’yaa is the slaughtering of dogs and chickens and the ritualistic imbibement of their blood. As the head fetishtigi explained, men must drink the blood to obtain the animals’ power and good fortune for the next farming season. This year was a particularly poor harvest, so the villagers of Sanadougou were willing to sacrifice many more animals than usual: 10 dogs and 30 chickens.

I could almost understand the transubstantiation of dog power into human power, but I had a difficult time stomaching the chickens. “Seriously, chickens are small and weak. I can’t imagine getting a lot of power by sacrificing a chicken.”

“You’re right – that is why we sacrifice 30 of them.”

So I fortunately missed out on the actual slaughter and blood-drinking rites per se, but I stuck around for the beer-drinking rites. By nightfall there were still drums banging and trance-like tunes on the goni, tin can guitar and balaphone and drunken old men doing this clumsy Moonwalk-like dance. And a grizzled old woman sold me an empty Seltzer bottle full of chimichama – home-brewed, millet beer. It looks and tastes like what I imagine apple juice would taste like if it was left to ferment and sour; it’s nothing that I would pay more than a little nominal change for just to say that I partook in a local cultural experience. I wouldn’t even drink it to get drunk for cheap – chimichama is only about 2 percent alcoholic content and the rest is barely-palatable deadweight water.

That doesn’t mean that the hardly-alcoholic qualities of chimichama prevent the local men from getting drunk – they just have to drink an obscene amount of it. They fill 10-liter jugs with this cheap home-brew and chug it all as fast as possible – they would use a beer bong if only American frat boys would join the Peace Corps en masse and show them how to make one. And since there is so much water to alcohol in this millet beer, the N’yaa celebrators pee like broken fire hydrants. Even before I had arrived, the ceremony grounds were full of shitfaced old men stumbling around looking for a good place to take a whizz, a lot of them passed out in the positions they fell in, a lot of them passed out stinking of the 98 percent of chimichama that their bodies no longer had any use for.

About the entirety of N’yaa celebrators would probably identify themselves as Muslim – a good deal of them will also slaughter a sheep as well at Eid al-Iftar and Eid al-Adha, but even an infidel like me cannot fathom how a bunch of old men who gather to drink dog and chicken blood and invoke the power of fetishes and get trashed on millet beer can say with a straight face that they belong to the pointedly austere monotheist religion that is Islam. Muslim doctrine here is generally more liberal than it is elsewhere in the Islamic world, but a religion which is can be summed up in the Shahada that “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet” cannot be so liberal that it can also incorporates explicitly animist sacrifice and idolatry. This is less like someone who calls themselves Jewish eating a bacon cheeseburger and watching The Charlie Brown Christmas Special than it is like someone who calls themselves Jewish regularly attending mass and receiving Communion and praying to Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

When you contextualize the founding of Islam in the 7th century and grasp that Muhammadd and the original jurists of Islam were developing their belief system at roughly the same time that the militant wing of Islam was busy expanding the Caliphate into North African territory, it makes sense that the writing of certain laws was just as much political as it was religious. For example, the code of Halal prohibits Muslims from the consumption of alcohol, the consumption of meat that was sacrificed in the name of pagan gods or idolatry, and it very explicitly prohibits the drinking of blood – i.e. it is forbidden for Muslims to partake in animist sacrifices like N’yaa. Though they might not have had the rites of the distant, isolated Bambara tribe in mind at the time, the Islamic jurists of a millennium ago knew enough of world religions to craft a law of hygiene and cleanlinesss directly and intentionally incompatible with the practices of takfir Arab, Persian, Turkish and African tribes.

I must reiterate the fact that very few Malians would publicly identify themselves as a follower of these rites; it is by no means a secret, but asides from the association with drunkenness and obvious reasons the attendees would like to keep the fact to themselves. The various tribes of the Sahel have spent millennia conquering and enslaving their neighbors, and once Islam arrived between the 10th and 12th centuries many clans converted as a guarantee of freedom – the Qur’an specifically forbids Muslims to enslave fellow members of the Umma but leaves idolaters and deniers of the faith to the whims of unregulated capitalism. Though chattel slavery does not really exist in southern Mali anymore (it does in the northern Songraï and Tamashek lands), Bambara, Minianka, Fulani and Malinke tribesmen alike find it at least in their social interests to publicly present themselves as Muslims – even if they drink millet beer, pray to fetishes, sacrifice dogs and chickens and drink their blood.

Yes, there are some Malians who still conduct ritualistic human sacrifice. To my understanding human sacrifice is significantly rarer than the sacrifice of dogs or chickens, but it is not as rare as it should be. People generally sacrifice other people for the same reason why they sacrifice monkeys or sheep, only this is considered to be a very dark practice associated only with the most evil of evil sorcerers. Albinos are in great danger of being targeted for human sacrifice as their abnormally-pigmented appendages are thought to bring good luck and a dismembered albino head is thought to be able to reveal the future like a really morbid Magic 8-Ball.

Apparently human sacrifice is most common amongst the Bobo tribe of northern Ségou province – a tribe which is distinctly more animist than the rest of the country. In recent years there have been a few Volunteers posted in Boboland who were solemnly warned that a very important festival coming up – though no one could tell when exactly this festival would be, and that when the festival occurred it was absolutely important that they stay in their house and never go outside especially at night because… well… no one would say... But the villagers would continue to reiterate emphatically that during the week of this ceremony they must never go outside. Donné donné villagers started to explain more and more about this mysterious festival until the Boboland Volunteers respectively decided it was time to pack up their bags and move to a different site.

Human sacrifice is allegedly confined to the most isolated, very least cosmopolitan and most animist villages where the rule of law and modern civilization don’t have too much sway. But there was even a human sacrifice-related incident pertaining to a Volunteer posted to a small village on the road to the Peace Corps training center Tubaniso – so close to urban culture that one could get there from Bamako by taxi. So this female Volunteer developed a close friendship with a spinster neighbor, and one day she realized that she hadn’t seen Bintu for a very long time. She was worried, and so she asked all of her other friends in village “Hey, do you know where Bintu is?”

For weeks she couldn’t get a straight answer; some villagers said that Bintu just got up and left, others said that she was “traveling”. Over time the villagers decided to level with their adopted Volunteer;

“Bintu is never coming back… because we sacrificed Bintu… and we ate her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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The Nyegenmason's Apprentice

(click here for musical accompaniment)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Amadou fills his soak pit with rocks.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, what?”

“A criminal.”

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

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

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

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

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

Insh’allah…

Enter the Poopopticon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oui?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“NO!!!”

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

“NO!!!”

“Why not?”

“It is DIRTY!!!”

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

“NO!!!”

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

Everyone raises their hand.

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

“NO!!!”

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

"NO!!!"

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

“YOU SHOULD BEAT THEM!!!”

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

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

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

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

“IN THE NYEGENS!!!”

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

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

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

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

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..."