The Big Necessity (33 page)

But the cheapest way to save money is to use the help of the heavens to empty the pit. Wait for the rains, divert the flowing pit contents into the street, hope for the best. Because of this fecal contamination, that deceptive 96 percent figure is hollowed out still more by other numbers. These are the numbers of cholera.

 

The intestinal bacteria
Vibro cholerae
is rightly terrifying. It can kill within twelve hours by causing massive dehydration and constant vomiting and diarrhea. Though it can be easily treated with oral rehydration salts, cholera victims who don't have clean water or a 20-cent sachet of salts will soon have agonizing stomach and muscle cramps, they will lose up to 30 percent of their body weight in hours, then they will turn blue, their eyes will go glassy, and they will die. Since sewers and sewage treatment vanquished cholera in the industrialized world, it has become mostly a disease of the poor, but not always. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, U.S. government officials warned that cholera was a possibility because sewage works had been knocked out, and the waters that people were wading in, drinking, and drowning in were teeming with fecal contamination. They also warned about typhoid, but it was cholera that made headlines. Perhaps cholera still strikes a chord because there is some lingering memory, in the flushed and plumbed world, of what it
used to do and how it used to kill, by the tens of thousands, quickly and pitilessly. Or because untreated, it will kill half the people it infects, for certain. The World Health Organization calls the absence of cholera “an indicator of social development.” If decent water and sanitation were present, cholera would not be. Cholera means there is something wrong, no matter what the statistics say. Cholera means the city is not working.

At a clinic in the sub-ward of Azimo in Dar es Salaam, in the month of April, I ask two nursing officials how many cholera cases they have had that year. At first they won't say, and I understood their discomfort, because they could be fired. After a bad outbreak of cholera in Dar in 2004, six environmental health officers lost their jobs. It was their fault the cholera came, said the authorities. It was not because of imperfect disposal systems for sewage, or the dreadful lack of safe pit-emptying services, or the abject failure of Dar's government to make the glaringly logical connection between streets swimming in excrement and the regular appearance of cholera. The nursing officers eventually say they had three thousand cases in one sub-ward in a five-month outbreak the year before. They were getting fifty new cases a week. When I repeat this figure to Sugden, he assumes I mean in all of Dar, and even then that it's shockingly high.

Officially, Dar es Salaam's sewage is treated in a series of waste stabilization ponds. As sewage treatment systems go, ponds are fine if a city has sufficient land and expertise to maintain them properly. These systems clean sewage by passing it through a series of ponds at a carefully measured velocity, giving bacteria enough time to form and feed on the sewage, cleaning it of solids, and—supposedly—pathogens. There are dozens of pond systems in France and Germany, and the Australian city of Melbourne uses waste stabilization ponds to clean half of its sewage. But the flow has to be carefully regulated, and so do the ponds.

Sugden takes me to some in a slum area called Buguruni. They are undergoing renovation but trucks are still discharging into them, including one that is pouring a yellowy-green and foul-smelling liquid into the catchment basin. There is no way that these ponds can dispose of all of Dar's sewage even if they were working. In fact, they serve only 10 percent of the city's population, and from the sight of them, they serve
them badly. For the 70 percent majority who have on-site sanitation, which is what pit latrines are, it's every method for itself. In practice, most of Dar's excrement is thrown into gulleys and alleys. It is on the streets and in the water, and in the cholera outbreaks that occur every year, steady as the rains.

At a garbage depot in the city ward of Temeke, I meet Mkuu Hanje. He's a senior Environmental Health Officer (EHO) who has worked for the city for twenty-one years. Now, he's had enough because his work is thankless and impossible. Officially, he is required “to make sure a community's health is ensured through disease prevention.” When the third-biggest killer of children in his city ward is diarrhea, disease prevention should consist of promptly reporting cholera and ensuring that latrines are safe and safely emptied. In practice, he can do neither because “when you report cholera, you get into trouble.” Even when he does manage to get someone to court, the fines are laughable, because they date from 1959. His boss is a ward councillor and politician unwilling to anger his constituents. “After five years,” Hanje tells me, “he must go back to people to get their vote, and my job is touching the day-to-day life of people. When you take people to court who don't have a latrine, and you've given them notice five times, the councillor thinks you are harassing them. It is a conflict.”

There are ways to get a pit emptied in Dar, but none are cheap and only one is legal. I go to find the vacuum truck operators who hang out at a junction at the end of Garden Road, their blue trucks coiled with ready hoses but idle. My Tanzanian companion Richard, an earnest and helpful WaterAid intern, advises me to stay in the car to counteract the
mzungu
(white person) effect. He thinks the tanker drivers will be hostile or ask for money. Neither is true. They are courteous and chatty, probably because they're bored stiff. They charge at least 70,000 shillings ($60) to empty a pit latrine or septic tank and not many people have that kind of money in a city where you can buy bread by the slice. Even if their service were affordable, their trucks can't get down narrow slum alleys to reach the customers. A tanker driver named Charles does most of the talking. He is elegantly dressed with shining brogues, because “smartness is up to a person's nature” and because his employer refuses to buy him gloves or boots. He tells me that kids call the tanker drivers
nyona mavi
, or shit-suckers. Charles laughs about it, but it irks. They're doing a service, and one that the city government can't manage to provide. By law the municipality is obliged to remove night soil from residential areas. In practice, this hardly ever happens. How can it, when the department has no tankers of its own? (When the city wants a tanker, it hires one of these, like everyone else.)

Because of this, Hanje's job amounts to firefighting. He must always react to crisis and never has time to prevent it. It is frustrating. He can't understand why there's no health planning, or why Temeke's municipal health budget in 2004–2005 allocated only $3,000 to on-site sanitation when 630,000 people rely on it (a figure that works out at less than half a cent per person). “When there is cholera, and there is a scarcity of drugs, the outcry is very high. But anyone in the street who sees their neighbor disposing of feces in the street will not complain. There is no outcry about sanitation. If people say, there is no water, or the road is very bad, politicians will react. But when it comes to toilets, no one complains. If you don't have a toilet, it's up to you.” If you empty it in the street, sowing the seeds of the next cholera outbreak, it's up to you. Hanje sighs, and so does Richard. Having just finished his training to be an EHO, he realizes he's just listened to the story of his next twenty-one years. Hanje wants out. “If I get a good office that wants to employ me as a cleaner,” he says, “I'd take the job.” Anything's better than pointless firefighting. “Maybe sanitation can be changed,” he says with profound weariness. “But I don't know how.”

 

The pleasant city of Dar in fact consists mostly of slums. At least 70 percent of Dar residents live in unplanned areas, and urban areas are expanding at nearly six times the country's overall growth rate. Dar's slums are quite nice. They do not, in places, feel like hell on earth. They do not, as Mumbai did, make me angry because no one should live like that (though I might feel differently during a pit-emptying session). Dar's slums have wide main streets and space. There are some trees, and on the main streets, half-sunken tires serve as benches. Leading off the main streets are the narrow, familiar alleys of slum living and all the poverty that goes along with them.

In Buguruni, not far from the waste stabilization ponds, I am trying to talk to some women who are standing behind a wooden stall and selling nothing that I can see. I am using an iPod to record and lay it on the stall. One woman reaches for it and therefore so do I, but she's only moving it away from the drips from the straw roof, and I feel prejudiced and terrible, but my prejudice is not unusual. City planners routinely use the excuse that slums are havens of criminality, usually just before they bulldoze them, when actually slum dwellers tend to be more exploited by criminal gangs than anyone else.

The women don't want to talk because I've asked them how they empty their latrine pit. Richard steps in because he understands what the problem is. He says, “We're not from the government,” and they laugh with relief and tell me how they would empty their pit if it got full, which is illegally. The most common method used to empty pits, at least by people who don't believe in tipping shit into the streets, is to use a
kutapisha
. The word comes from the Swahili word
tapika
, meaning “to vomit.” A literal translation would be “one who makes the pit vomit.” Most literature I read about Tanzanian pit emptiers refers to them more delicately as “frogmen”—because they dive into pits, presumably—though not one person I meet uses that term even in translation. The
kutapisha
is a mythical figure. Ask a Temeke resident where to find one, and they will respond with the equivalent of seeing a man about a dog. “Oh, you ask around.” Or, “You go somewhere really poor and ask anyone. Anyone who is desperate enough will do it.”

 

Here is how to empty a Tanzanian latrine pit. Take yourself, and a colleague if you can pay one, to the pit in question. It can be during daytime, though night may be better, as your client may be embarrassed by your activity and your activity is illegal. First, take a sledgehammer to the concrete latrine squatting slab that covers the pit. Pour in five kilograms of salt to liquefy the hard layers at the bottom. Leave for one to two days. When you return, bring a can of kerosene and pour it over the contents to mask the smell. Put on boots if you've got them, but you probably won't have gloves, and start digging. It should take a day at least. Do not be alarmed if you find fetuses, and watch out for sharp
objects and syringes. When you've finished, decant the muck into another hole and install a new slab. For all this work, you can charge the sum of 95,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $80). Replacing the slab costs extra. It won't be taxed, because you are doing a job unrecognized by, but tolerated by, city authorities. If you didn't do it, no one else would.

This information is worth money because it comes from a professional. With some effort, Richard has tracked down a
kutapisha
named Mawazo. He's a young man, with smart trousers and confidence, and he talks freely as our little delegation stands in front of his family passport toilet, long enough for the children who gather at any conversation to get bored and move off to find nothing else to do. It's good of Mawazo to take the time, because this is the rainy season, when the water table is high, pits fill, and he is most in demand.

Mawazo doesn't use the word
kutapisha
. He says people call him a
kupakuwa
. After some discussion—“a serving removal man; a person who takes things out of one dish and puts them into another”—this is finally translated as pit-scooper or ladler. The scooper doesn't mind his job because the money is good and he is in demand. Also, though I've heard reports to the contrary, he doesn't have to work at night. Why should he? He has nothing to be ashamed of.

Sugden is impressed. “You're doing an important job for public health,” he tells him, though Mawazo looks bemused. But it is an imperfect and possibly dangerous solution. By decanting the pit contents into another hole nearby, the
kutapisha
method keeps fecal contamination in the community where it can easily seep into groundwater. Also, Mawazo only empties six pits a month in high season and the other full pits must be going somewhere. Sugden had another idea. If they had a service that was more affordable, that avoided breaking the slab, and that was more accessible for these back alleys, maybe people would use it. Perhaps they would use the Gulper.

 

Outside the conventional toilet industry, the world of sanitation does not lack innovation. There are thousands of latrine designs; countless varieties of wastewater treatment methods; sewer robots and reverse-osmosis membranes. There are ultralight wilderness toilets that can be
carried in a backpack, and Jiffy bags of crystals for drivers stuck in traffic to pee in. There is even an enterprising retired Navy commander called Virginia Ruth Pinney who has taken the stinkiest compound in feces—skatole—and weaponized it, according to U.S. patent 6,242,489. Fecal stink bombs are now available as nonlethal weapons for “riot control, to clear facilities, to deny an area, or as a taggant,” according to the arms control group the Sunshine Project. But not many of these innovations had the same research and development process as the Gulper. According to Sugden, this involved, “Oh, about five pints in the pub.”

The Gulper is a manual latrine-emptying pump. In Sugden's vision, it could be carried by one man, who would transport the pump and the emptied pit contents, on a simple motorbike. First he needed someone to make it and he knew who to ask. Suggy—his school nickname—was still friends with Stephen Ogden, a farmer in Yorkshire whom Suggy calls Oggy, who gave up dairy farming when it became cheaper to kill a cow than send for the vet, and now does fabricating instead. I later go to meet Oggy at his farm near Bradford. It perches on a patch of ruralness that takes you by surprise, coming out of nowhere at the top of a normal built-up hill of houses and cul-de-sacs. There is a large workshop, some green fields, and a Methodist church that his grandfather built in the farmyard, and that still gets a two-strong congregation on Sundays.