The Big Necessity (11 page)

Jack Sim is launching the latest summit of the World Toilet Organization in the Manezh conference center in Moscow, a skip away from the Kremlin, and he is doing it with his usual weapons of humor and grave facts. Two-thirds of the world without sanitation. Over a billion people drinking filthy water every day. If the world can talk about eating food (he calls this “uploading”), then isn't it time they talked about downloading, too?

The reporters take notes and record as required, and the next day the results are what I have come to expect. Bad, tired puns abound. Flushed with pride. Pooh-poohing the competition. Raising a stink. One newspaper op-ed, though supposedly in praise of public conveniences, couldn't resist sniping that the WTO was “unaware perhaps of the rather bigger group of the same name based in Geneva.”

Of course it wasn't. Sim knows exactly what he's doing. He chose the abbreviation to get the kinds of coverage he now does get, even if it's only usually around World Toilet Day on November 19, or at the WTO's two annual conventions. Sim is a humorous man, and his jokes—some smutty, usually funny—are fired constantly (he tells one reporter that both WTOs deal with big and small businesses), but his vocation is somber. To get the world to talk properly—or at all—about sanitation, any weapon will do. “People joke about it,” he says, “but when the jokes stop, they listen. When they've stopped listening, they take action.” Action is certainly required. The second half of the twentieth century saw billions of dollars spent on trying to provide safe and healthy methods of excreta disposal to developing countries. And still the numbers were horrifying and still the projects failed. By the end of the 1990s, sanitation needed help, and it got Jack Sim.

 

Sim makes me think of a sprite. It might be his height, which is not enormous, or the shiny black hair falling in a floppy fringe, or the crackling, zinging energy. I notice the zing because he tells me his story at eight o'clock one morning on a coach traveling through Moscow's outskirts. The World Toilet Organization delegation is on a field trip to see the Russian Toilet Museum—actually a field of Port-o-Potties—and I'm about to doze when Sim bounces into the seat next to me to continue a conversation we'd started two days earlier. I'm not at my best in the morning hours, so I switch on the recorder and switch off my brain. Sim doesn't need any stimuli. He has his own.

In 1996, he was a successful businessman running a midsized company that traded in building materials. He had an agreeable house, a wife, four children, and the trappings of success. His home city of Singapore had been transformed from a middling island into a flourishing business center of skyscrapers and gloss, where cleanliness and order were prized enough for long-haired rockers to be banned along with chewing gum. Then one morning, Sim read in the newspaper an appeal by the prime minister for an increase in “social graciousness.” “He was talking about the cleanliness of public toilets, and he was blaming users' behavior. It could have been true, but what causes bad behavior? If I go to a toilet and it's smelly, I don't think I'll behave very well.”

He was offended by the article, but it made him think. He began to look at toilets. They were indeed in a shameful state. By now his business could run smoothly without him, so he could take on a new project. Why not toilets? I ask him whether he started reading up on it. “No,” he says firmly. “What for? I had forty years of experience to consult on.” He remembered watching other kids in his poor neighborhood running around with worms hanging out of their backsides. He thought of all the filthy toilets he had visited in his home country, despite its wealth and development. He concluded that there were problems and that taboos weren't helping. He thought “there was a need to legitimize the subject.” In 1998, he formed the Singaporean Restroom Association and began plans for a global organization. Using $150,000 of his own money, he traveled around the world to learn what he needed to, but from experts, not from books.

 

First he checked out what was already happening in the sanitation world. There wasn't much, despite the number of high-profile public commitments that have been issued over the last three decades. The 1980s had been designated the International Drinking Water and Safe Sanitation Decade by the United Nations. By the end of it, poor toiletless people were supposed to have safe, adequate sanitary facilities. But they didn't, and the decade was extended to the end of the 1990s and renamed the Third Water Decade. Since 2005, the world has been in the grip of the decade of Water For All. There have been high-profile water-related conferences in abundance, though sanitation is always an afterthought, if it's considered at all. (At the 2004 World Water Week, the biggest global water event, sanitation was relegated to a seminar held before the conference even began.)

After all these conferences and dedicated decades, the world was left with four in ten people still defecating in fields and on roadsides, and with diarrhea still killing more children under five than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria. There were some hopeful signs: one in three of the world's people who gained toilets got them between 1990 and 2004. Pete Kolsky, senior sanitation specialist at the World Bank, thinks this is worthy of praise. “When you think of the long history of humanity—e.g.
ten thousand years of urban living—that strikes me as an unsung achievement.” Also, with population growth “it's very hard to stay in place.” All targets are moving ones.

By the 1990s, investment had declined along with momentum. The authors of the 2006 Human Development Report, an annual publication of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), wrote that “when it comes to water and sanitation, the world suffers from a surplus of conference activity and a deficit of action.” Several factors contribute to this ineptitude. Responsibility for sanitation was fragmented: twenty-three UN agencies have some responsibility for it, with no one agency taking the lead. There is a United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, but none for resolving the biggest public health crisis on this planet, and one the Human Development Report authors put in its proper place. “The 1.8 million child deaths each year related to clean water and sanitation dwarf the casualties associated with violent conflict. No act of terrorism generates economic devastation on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation. Yet the issue barely registers on the international agenda.”

Outside the UN and development world, there was a similar lack of focus. There were well-established toilet associations—in Britain and Japan, for example—but they were doing their own thing. The Japan Toilet Association installed November 10 as National Toilet Day (as 11/10 in Japanese sounds like the characters for “clean toilet”) and ran good conferences, but in Japanese. The British Toilet Association set up a successful Loo of the Year competition (successful enough that winners' revenue allegedly doubles), but its members came from the plumbing industry and weren't desperate to solve the world's sanitation problems. There was no global, organized association campaigning to improve the world's rotten sanitation state. Jack Sim thought the planet needed one. In 1999, he founded the World Toilet Organization. He knew what he wanted it to be: a support network for all existing organizations. It wouldn't charge membership fees. It would be, in his words, “a servant, not a leader.”

Sim also wanted the new WTO to be a campaigner. He wanted to create a global lobbyist for the cause of better and sustainable sanitation, because there was none. But he had never been an activist. He wasn't sure how to go about it. He needed a mentor. He was Singaporean Chinese,
from a tradition that respected wisdom and experience. Instinctively, he did what many sanitation professionals now propose: he decided to learn from an HIV campaigner. The similarities are clear: both HIV and excreta-related diseases arise from activities considered private and unspeakable. So Sim went to meet Mr. Condom, the name by which Mechai Viravaidya, a former Thai senator, is best known.

Viravaidya is an impressive man who speaks fluent English, having grown up in Australia. He wears a bow tie and tweeds and has an idiosyncratic wit that must have endeared him to Sim. During parallel campaigns to reduce Thailand's population, Viravaidya persuaded women to use the Pill by calling it “the family welfare vitamin” and having village shopkeepers sell it. Thais considered condoms a taboo topic of conversation, along with sex, but Mr. Condom was undaunted. He launched a “cops and rubbers” campaign, got taxi drivers to distribute contraceptives, and opened the Cabbages & Condoms restaurant in Bangkok, on whose tables a bowl of condoms takes the place of after-dinner mints. (Its name derives from Viravaidya's theory that condoms should be as cheap as vegetables.) He also enlisted the army in his crusade, persuading military radio to broadcast safe-sex messages.

One lesson that Sim learned was about language. Viravaidya tailored his message to his audience. He held condom-blowing contests with schoolchildren, and talked profit and loss with businessmen (his punchline was “Dead customers can't buy anything”). “He's not talking to them about high morals or anything like that,” Sim tells me with admiration. “He's talking to them in a way they like to hear.” Partly thanks to Mr. Condom's efforts, new HIV infections in Thailand decreased by a staggering 87 percent.

 

Sim came away from meeting Viravaidya having learned that anything could be made talkable. Also, “You have to laugh at yourself first, because people are going to laugh. But after they laugh at you, they will listen. If I hadn't been taught that, I would never have gone any further than a couple of months.”

Instead, his World Toilet Organization has now run eight World Toilet events attended by more than 4,000 people. I go to two events,
and they are both memorable, though Bangkok beats Moscow for flair with a line of toilets onstage, their lids spelling out “Happy Toilet,” and by being the only WTO event to be held under martial law. (The Thai military had kicked out the prime minister a few months earlier but judged a toilet conference no threat to national security.)

The Moscow summit nonetheless has a certain glamour. The Manezh conference hall is a gracious building only slightly marred by a large portable toilet parked outside as part of the expo. Downstairs, a fur exhibit is packed. Upstairs, the toilet show attracts a smaller crowd, despite the pull of a terrorist-proof toilet whose concrete foundation makes it safe from suicide bombers, apparently. It's not a bad selling point: toilets are vulnerable places, especially for royals. Henri III of France was supposedly stabbed by a monk while at his business in 1589, and the fifteenth-century Scottish king James I was murdered by noblemen while hiding in his privy.

WTO events can produce a colorful cast list. There may be a Russian professor of hydraulics who appears at a breakfast meeting with a can of beer in his pocket. There is usually a delegation of Chinese who give short presentations and are not seen again because, according to other delegates, “They only come for the shopping.” There are always things to learn. During breaks, I find out that Australian automatic toilet operators use the terms Code Red (for cleaning incidents involving blood) and Code Brown (for the obvious). The Australian automatic toilet operator who tells me this is Scott Chapman, whom I meet in the first-floor cafe. He looks bored. He is a broker by profession, but has been reluctantly roped into the automatic toilet business by his father, a man conveniently called W. C. Chapman, for whom he is standing in. He wants to know why anyone would possibly want to write a book about sanitation, and looks astonished to learn how much of the world doesn't have any, and of the consequences. We kept in touch over the next year, and I watched with amusement as he turned from reluctant toilet delegate to a sanitation-solving pioneer. He went to tsunami-hit areas and learned about septic tanks and groundwater contamination. He became seduced by vacuum toilets, because they use little water and can be installed with regular sewage systems. He learned, as I learned, that not taking the WTO seriously is easy and a mistake. Behind the jokes, Sim is resolutely
committed to his cause. (This is a man who has named his four children Faith, Truth, Earth, and Worth, because “I gave them names with virtues so they could build on them.”)

Thus far, the WTO has set up a World Toilet College in Singapore. There are plans for a Peace Prize for Sanitation, a rock concert in China, and for a Toilet Development Bank that would give $100 low-interest loans to encourage poor people to build latrines. Over the months, I get emails informing me of yet another of Jack's projects, and though he is a showman, they generally come true, because he's a networker. On the WTO Web site, the organization's logo—a blue toilet seat—is now featured alongside the familiar blue laurel wreath of the UN because the WTO is beginning to be given proper weight by the development establishment. Plans are being made to set up a Global Sanitation Bond, a finance mechanism meant to improve on existing ways of getting money from rich countries to poor ones.

All these activities, Sim says, mean the WTO is proceeding according to plan. “The right way to do any social work is to work until you're not needed anymore. I think this is the way to do it: To do evangelism; to get legitimacy in the media and to have a united global voice. Then the political process will come. I try to market the subject like a religion.” Religion needs a charismatic high priest, so Sim plans to turn to Bollywood or Hollywood. “I think for us to come to terms with the fact that we go to the toilet would be quite easy. It only needs a few movie stars to talk openly about it.”

 

Talk to anyone who is trying to improve the world's sanitation, and this idea will become a refrain. We need a champion. A Bono or a Geldof. A Nelson Mandela or an Angelina Jolie. A film star or a politician who has the courage to talk about toilets, when most people only want to talk about faucets.