That’s the Pits

Three of the trainees help dig the pit
in the background at this house.

Last week my colleague led a training on latrines in another region.  The focus again was on making a simple pit latrine that a family can fill in six-months.  Then it provides the perfect place to plant a fruit tree and move the latrine placement somewhere else.  The purpose behind suggesting this arrangement is to make people see more than just a sometimes invisible benefit to using a latrine.

The evangelists were intrigued by the added benefits of a latrine if you use it as compost too.  Finding a way to help grow a tree is interesting in this place where tree saplings usually don’t last long.  But the down-side of this idea is you still need to find enough water to keep the tree living, even if you have great nutrients in the soil for it to grow.  Watering trees becomes a much lower priority when you have to carry and pay significantly for all your water each day.

A big concern that the evangelists lifted up is the smell of a latrine.  When people go in fields surrounding a village there isn’t a large collection of smelly waste.  Because there’s no flushing in these pit toilets or even resources for air-fresheners, it becomes less desirable to collect smelly waste in your yard.  The biggest help that people can simply do is putting handfuls of ash in the latrine after every use to keep the smell and flies down.  It will also make the fertilizer better.  We’ve also had recommended putting handfuls of dirt in too.  The dirt is more than just a cover for the refuse.  It also already has in it the right microorganisms to process the refuse into less smelly compost more quickly.

Two of the evangelists at the training already had different NGO’s come and build a latrine for them.  One is still using it.  The other said that when it filled up, they just stopped using it.  Now he knows that he has a good store of potential fertilizer on hand as long as it sat for a year (and doesn’t have too many plastic bags that have blown into it).  The evangelists told of other NGO’s that have come through offering to give people the cement and supplies needed to build latrines.  But most people just took those things and sold them instead of making a latrine.

In general, this is a testimony to how people are usually skeptical of new things.  But maybe they will be willing to experiment and see enough benefits to stick with an idea that even here is commonly known as a favorite suggestion of health experts.

-- El Padre