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Updated
January 2005
The
Flying Toilets of
Kenya
Been in
Kenya
recently as a medical volunteer and had the chance to participate in the
"flying toilet campaign." In the slum
areas of
Nairobi,
esp. Kibera there are no toilets, actually about eight toilets for the
nearly a million inhabitants of the area. Know what they do???
During the day if you have to pee just turn
behind your shack and do it, it might be in front of someone else's
shack but who cares!! to poo you have to use plastic (read polythene) bags
in the privacy of your shack and then when darkness comes or when nobody
is looking....hurl it out, again don't care where it lands as long as it's
flown out of your HOUSE....
The real FLYING toilet
Facilities
in Togo, West Africa
I
was a participant of a Canada World
Youth Exchange in Togo, West Africa in 1986. My group lived in an
agricultural village called Lama Tessi. One of our host families had been
kind enough to build us a tiny charming toilet hut with a thatched roof.
The toilet was just a hole over a shallow pit, fairly clean most of the
time.
We
had no electricity in our village so at night I would bravely make my way
to the hut with my flashlight. Night inevitably brought out the giant but
harmless beetles that enjoyed hanging out around the hole. You would just
step around them while positioning yourself, checking the area with your
flashlight; and eventually, your perverse nature would make you direct
the light into the hole where millions
of white maggots could be seen swimming happily in the muck. The funniest
incident there though (because it did not happen to me) was when one of
our Togolese counterparts went to relieve himself and the thin mud flour
gave away under him. He came scrambling out of there pretty fast and
raging mad. I
still laugh at that 14
years later!
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Wajir
,
Kenya
There
is a big problem facing the people of Wajir (KENYA).
They don’t have facilities to dispose their 'hides' i.e waste.
For children that were born and bread in Wajir, they have no
experience of what it takes to use a constructed toilet. The old town's
problem is that the water table is so near that domestic wells are 3 fit
deep and that efforts to dig a toilet contaminates the underground water,
hence buckets are used that fills up with days.
Wajir is ranked as world most dirtiest town. Other problems include the
formation of 'dirty brown precipitate'- chemical terms when one showers
with an ordinary toilet soap, this forces the residents to continually use
detergent for all domestic washes.
Above all drinking this water is the mother of
all this problems.
There are
no “good" public WC’s in Kenya.
Be prepared - bring your own
tissue and always carry hand sanitizer gel in your daypack.
Some toilets are pit, some are western-style and very few flush on
their own. You may be asked
to pay a few shilling for an attendant to fill the tank with water and
flush it for you after you've finished your business.
Or, alternatively, the attendant will ask you to stop by his
"shop" and look at his carvings - an offer that is sometimes
hard to refuse. Unless you fly from lodge to lodge, you will need to use
the available rest stops. This
is all part of the third world experience.
Enjoy and be grateful!
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