Slog
News & ArtsTuesday, February 7, 2012
Health Life Without Modern Toilet Facilities
Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 8:29 AM
SHANGHAI - As the music from the Customs House clock tower rang out over the Bund and East Nanjing Road at 7:30 am, it was joined by the sound of flushing water in the side lanes near the city's iconic shopping streets.Life without modern toilets is in my mind unimaginable. I simply can't picture it. I have never lived a day without access to a toilet, electricity, and tap water. Where I live, four people share two bathrooms. In the slums of Mumbai, as many as 300 people share a single toilet. “The brain is wider than the sky,” wrote Emily Dickinson in a poem admired by neuroscientists. The brain, however, does not seem wider than the gap between life in rich cities and life in slums. More boggling than that are the gaps within cities:Gu Yaqin carried a plastic basin containing her family's overnight excrement and walked to a public toilet close to her home in Pentang Lane, one of the narrow alleys near Nanjing Road. She went into a small room separate from the toilet and quickly washed the basin, which has been a daily routine for more than 20 years.
About 5,600 people live in Gu's neighborhood, which is within walking distance of the luxurious hotels and restaurants on the Bund and only two minutes' walk from the Apple store on Nanjing Road.
The elderly women:
Wu Xiaolin, head of Dongfeng community, told China Daily that 90 percent of its residents have to rely on those facilities.
"Some elderly women have even suffered fractures because the wooden toilet bowls were so heavy that they fell on the public toilet's slippery floor," he said.
2
Laying sewage lines in so many places in itself must be an enormous task. But where do you drain sewage when millions live down river? They could collect it and use it as fertilizer.
3
I find "modern toilets" anything but. It's a stupid waste of resources for us to urinate and defecate into a porcelain bowl of drinking water and then flush it away with 1.5 - 5 gallons of further drinking water. For an average person, that's 10.5 - 35 gallons of processed drinking water wasted every day.
We do the rest of the world no favors by cheering as they're brought to the same idiotic wastefulness that we're practicing. We'd be better off finding ways to make composting toilets and the like more efficient and cost effective, utilizing them, and then helping spread their use.
We do the rest of the world no favors by cheering as they're brought to the same idiotic wastefulness that we're practicing. We'd be better off finding ways to make composting toilets and the like more efficient and cost effective, utilizing them, and then helping spread their use.
5
Privileged African.
@3
You say this because you *have* a toilet and never had anything but. Live like someone in rural India or Africa for a few months or a few years and I guarantee you'll be singing a very different tune. Your sentiment is sweet though. Really.
@3
You say this because you *have* a toilet and never had anything but. Live like someone in rural India or Africa for a few months or a few years and I guarantee you'll be singing a very different tune. Your sentiment is sweet though. Really.
8
It's called a compost toilet. You could still have some self-cleaning facilities with a composting toilet and the difference would likely be negligible.
9
Charles,
I lived for three years w/o running water and a flush toilet in Cameroon, Africa. It's totally doable. I just got used to using a pit latrine. They are fairly sanitary and certainly use much less water. I wonder sometimes if the country would be in better shape using them vs. flush toilets?
Flush toilets are an extremely recent phenomenon.
I lived for three years w/o running water and a flush toilet in Cameroon, Africa. It's totally doable. I just got used to using a pit latrine. They are fairly sanitary and certainly use much less water. I wonder sometimes if the country would be in better shape using them vs. flush toilets?
Flush toilets are an extremely recent phenomenon.
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