Shit Tales

August 1, 2016

OMG: Squat toilets?

A man urinating in public outside and just to the right of that enclosed toilet building.

A women’s bathroom where every single one of the eight or so Western toilet seats were smeared with piles of feces.

Descending from the cloudy sunrise viewpoint on Tiger Hill in Darjeeling, I observe several men urinating in public alongside of the road (no hiding behind trees) while hundreds of pedestrians walk past them back to their vehicles.

A public toilet in Old Delhi that merely consisted of a wall of urinals with no outside enclosure.

Indian train tracks: the longest toilet in the world. Train toilets really do drop all waste directly onto the tracks.

A tour group member reports one morning that an entire family squatted together to defecate out in the open..

Seen from an elevated Delhi Metro train: a store window filled with Western-style toilets for sale.

There’s a toilet museum in Delhi????

Toilets in India are a frequent topic of conversation for Western tourists, from the introduction of squat toilets to the unbelievably small rolls of toilet paper in hotel bathrooms to the cleanliness, or lack thereof, of available Western and squat toilet bathrooms. Not to mention the rather shocking observation of some Indians urinating or defecating in public spaces. Ewww.

I’ve found, though, that the situations I encountered while in India where I was most shocked, or when I had the strongest reactions, are the places about which I need to question, think, research, and write. There’s a knee-jerk tendency in everyone—myself included—to judge behaviors that are different and therefore difficult to understand. So today’s blog post takes on one of the most socially disturbing of topics: shitting.

The first thing you might be faced with is the prevalence of the squat toilet. It’s definitely a surprise to walk into a public bathroom facility and discover this is the only option. You can find a video here on how to use a squat toilet, but let me just say that it’s a lot more complicated than suggested in the video. First, you have to ask someone to hold your purse, or if no one is available, you have to secure it over your shoulder or around your neck; take off your sunglasses and put them into the purse as well as your cell phone; roll up your pant legs; and, tuck your toilet paper roll inside your bra so that it is readily available. Then, you have to use your flabby uninitiated thighs to squat and balance yourself over the hole, pulling your pants away from the stream while watching out for your shoes! Toilet paper usage in this position is a challenge. Using a squat toilet while on a moving train presents additional challenges, although there is a hand bar with which to steady yourself. The first time I successfully used a squat toilet was, afterward, a fist-bumping event. Still, I never quite got used to it.

One would tend to believe that the Western toilet is superior to the squat toilet, especially in view of the idea that the latter tend to be found in developing countries and so therefore easily considered more “primitive.” But there are surprising reasons to suggest that squat toilets actually promote more successful pooping. One is recent research promoting the idea that squatting is more in line with what our bodies need to do to evacuate.  A 2003 study comparing the relative ease between sitting and squatting demonstrated that squatting is easier and more effective for defecation, because, while squatting, the bowel aligns directly downward toward the direction of elimination, whereas the sitting position produces a curvature in the bowel which requires more of an effort to poop. Clearly, squatting is the way to go.

Another reason squat toilets are possibly more desirable is that they have the potential to be more sanitary. What woman would not tell you of the efforts required to either cover a toilet seat with layers of paper or hover over the toilet bowl in order to avoid touching the germy surface with her bottom? Bathrooms with squat toilets may have their problems with cleanliness but they do not involve the transfer of bottom-bacteria.

I’m not suggesting that all Western toilets the world over should be changed over to squat toilets. I’m just saying that we Westerners should be careful to assert toilet superiority.

Not only are our Western toilets not the best for pooping, our traditional bathrooms are inefficiently designed. The bathroom developed rather haphazardly over time, and hasn’t changed much since about 1910. The main wasteful culprit is the mixing of graywater (from sink and shower or tub) with blackwater (toilets), sending it all, gallons and gallons, through sewer pipes to wastewater treatment plants. That vast infrastructure needed to support current Western ways of body waste disposal require mammoth water purification plants to clean waste from dirty water and reintroduce it into the waterways.

Why, when in the West know that our toilets are not the best for our bodies, our bathroom plumbing is not the most efficient to deal with waste, and our waterways are still compromised by the 772 cities in the US who still use “combined sewers,” which “collect rainwater runoff, domestic sewage, and industrial wastewater in the same pipe,” and are allowed to spew out untreated waste into waterways during incidents of heavy rain, for example, do we promote the relatively backward Western method of body waste treatment technologies?

Considering that the World Bank loaned India $1.5 billion to assist the Indian government in promoting toilet usage in the country, it must be the case that Western commodes and Western plumbing are considered the normative and desirable practice (I won’t get into the politics of international lending practices to ostensibly fight poverty here). This loan money is being joined to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) campaign to make India clean by 2019; in this case, to educate those with outdoor defecation habits about sanitation and propriety as well as to provide toilets.

So far, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has not had much success with the toilet program; rural people are resistant to the technology. I don’t know why some Indians prefer open-air elimination. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert (here, here, here, and here) on the political, financial, ethnic, racial, class, caste, gender, language, social or cultural implications of India’s differing expressions of body waste elimination (not to mention colonial/post-colonial implications). I was amazed to learn, though, that there are more than 1,000 words for shit in India, and most, no doubt, taboo. Already this is a challenging linguistic divide, when you are talking about sanitation education. It’s an extremely complex issue.

But I ask you: Who cleans the toilets in your home? Who cleans toilets in highway rest stops, airports, government buildings, schools, universities, small businesses and large ones? Think about it. Who LOVES cleaning bathrooms? Someone else, usually from the lower classes, usually from the traditional caretaking gender, takes care of the room where you leave your body waste. If there’s nobody else to clean up your poop, and you avoid the issue by pooping in a field, why would you care about using a porcelain throne? No fuss, no muss. I would be hesitant to judge some rural Indians for continuing the convenient practice of open defecation without meaningful incentives.

Why, in a country with different cultural practices as well as uneven water supplies (due to geography and drought), would Western toilets, Western plumbing, and Western water treatment systems be the goal?

When I was in India the first time, in 2014, I had the idea that developing countries actually provide opportunities to adapt newer, better, technologies, rather than trying to build on possibly antiquated infrastructures, or importing outdated Western practices…or any Western practices. They could be models of the future, I thought. Of course, I was being naïve…

And that’s just plain shitty.

 

Further reading:

A one-man campaign to promote cultural change and a New Delhi toilet museum.

Toilet change is political in the U.S., too.

Indian trains were designed by the British, including drop-to-tracks toilet waste. Here’s what’s happening to correct that.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has gotten in on the action, with a “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge,” funding research projects for the development of sustainable toilet solutions in India, and elsewhere. I’m not sure how this intersects with the World Bank loan program to India. Here are some designs from the 2014 Reinvent the Toilet Fair held in New Delhi.

There’s such a thing as a World Toilet Organization,  a UN World Toilet Day, and the organization’s work in India.

And, just for fun, here are a couple of books with pictures of toilets around the world.

 

Thanks, as always, for reading my blog! Next blog post: Brigadier General John Nicholson.