The Big Necessity (39 page)

Toilet paper industry worth $15–20 billion
Conal Walsh, “Put Through the Mill by US Toilet Tissue Titans,”
Observer
, July 20, 2003.

57 sheets a day
Personal communication with Celeste Kuta, Charmin, February 2008.

Love your bum
D&AD (Design and Art Direction), “Velvet Case Study,” 2005, p. 1; available at
www.dandad.org/inspiration/creativityworks/5/pdf/Velvet.pdf
.

Second most complained about ad
Advertising Standards Authority, “Annual Report, 2003,” p. 7.

Sales of Rollwipes were dismal
Irina Barbalova, “Wet Toilet Tissue Yet to Win Over Consumers,”
Euromonitor
, May 29, 2003.

American toilet market leader Kohler
“Complete Your Bathroom with a High-Tech Kohler Toilet Seat,” Kohler news release, June 20, 2007.

A field of daisies
Barry Sonnenfeld, “Tucks Can Change Your Life,”
Esquire
, June 1, 2004.

3. 2.6 BILLION

The rather bigger group of the same name
“In Praise of Public Loos,”
Guardian
, July 31, 2007.

One in three of the world's people
Personal communication with Pete Kolsky, November 2007.

A deficit of action
United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, 2006, “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 70.

Twenty-three UN agencies
Ibid., p. 8.

No act of terrorism
Ibid., p. 3.

Winners' revenue allegedly doubles
Jehangir S. Pocha, “Just Flush with Pride,”
Boston Globe
, November 26, 2004.

A staggering 87 percent
Nellie Bristol, “Mechai Viravaidya: Thailand's ‘Condom King,'”
The Lancet
371/9607 (2008): p. 109. A 2006 report estimated that 19,500 new infections will occur in 2004, compared with 143,000 new infections in 1990. Without the prevention campaigns, 7.7 million more people would have been infected, or 14 times more than is now the case. The World Bank, “The Economics of Effective AIDS Treatment: Evaluating Policy Options for Thailand,” (2006), pp. xxii, xxiii.

Eight World Toilet events
Personal communication with Jack Sim, October 2007.

Stabbed by a monk
Martin Monestier,
Histoire et Bizarreries Sociales des Excréments: Des Origines à Nos Jours
(Paris: Le Cherche-Midi, 1997), p. 44.

Hiding in his privy
The king had apparently blocked up his only chance of escape—the hole through which the privy contents were supposed to fall to the ground below—after he had been playing a ball game and lost too many balls down the hole. He was finally stabbed sixteen times after “that odious and false traitour, sir Robert Grame [descended] down also into the privy to the king, with an horribill and mortall weapon in his hand.” John Shirley,
Life and Death of King James I of Scotland
, ed. Joseph Stevenson (Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1837); accessed from the National Libraries of Scotland,
http://www.nls.uk/scotlandspages/timeline/1437.html
.

Celebrities who do charity work for water
“Water Wins the Celebrity Oscar—Sanitation Stuck on the B-List,” International Water and Sanitation Council/IRC news release, March 23, 2007.

A smile on my face
Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC),
Listening
(Geneva: WSSCC, 2004), p. 23.

An average $7 return
Guy Hutton, Laurence Haller, and Jamie Bartram, “Global Cost-Benefit Analysis of Water Supply and Sanitation Interventions,”
Journal of Water and Health
(May 2007): 481–502.

£54,000 a year
David Redhouse, Paul Roberts, and Rehema Tukai, “Everyone's a Winner? Economic Valuation of Water Projects,” Water Aid Discussion Paper, 2004, p. 3, quoting Tristram Hunt,
Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), p. 259.

It would save $660 billion
Hutton, Haller, and Bartram, “Global Cost-Benefit Analysis”; and personal communication with Guy Hutton, March 2008.

Losses from agricultural revenue
John Oldfield, “Community-Based Approaches to Water and Sanitation: A Survey of Best, Worst and Emerging Practices,” draft paper for the Navigating Peace Initiative of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Environmental Change and Security Program, p. 13.

Averting a child's death
Sandy Cairncross and Vivian Valdmanis, “Water Supply and Sanitation,” in
Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries
, 2nd ed., ed. D. T. Jamison, G. Alleyne, J. G. Breman, M. Claeson, D. B. Evans, Prabhat Jha, et al. (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2006), p. 776.

47 times more on its military budget
United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2006, p. 62.

Blowing up some electricity pylons
Electricity pylons from Kasrils's application for amnesty from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, available at
http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/decisions/2001/ac21168.htm
. Other biographical information from the African National Congress website at http:www.//anc.org.za/people/kasrils.html; and from personal communication with Lorna Michaels at South Africa's Ministry of Intelligence. For more on Kasrils, including his career as the poet ANC Khumalo, see his
Armed and Dangerous: My Undercover Struggle under Apartheid
(Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1993). Kasrils's senior sanitation adviser during his time as Minister for Toilets was Denis Goldberg, who was convicted along with Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, and spent twenty-two years in prison. He's now particularly interested in latrine emptying by enzymes.

Victory with its pants down
“The great anatomist Sidrac,” in conversation with doctors Goudman and Grou, as told by Voltaire, believed strongly in the power of constipation, telling his listeners that Oliver Cromwell had not visited the necessary house for eight days before he cut off King Charles's head. Equally, Sidrac stated, the Duke of Guise le Balafré was often advised to avoid King Henri III on a winter's day when the northeast wind was blowing, because the king would be attempting to alleviate his constipation on his close-stool. François Voltaire,
Candide, Zadig
and Selected Stories
, trans. Donald Murdoch Frame (New York: Signet Classic, 2001), p. 344.

The color that flies liked least
Monestier,
Histoire at Bizarreries
, p. 179.

The excreta is deadly
According to Charles Heyman of
Jane's Defence Weekly, pungis
are still used to guard opium poppy fields in Southeast Asia. In Colombia, meanwhile, the revolutionary group ELN has used bombs containing clay mixed with human feces, to increase the risk of infecting wounds. Personal communication with Charles Heyman; Mariano C. Bartolome and Maria Jose Espona, “Chemical and Biological Terrorism in Latin America: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,”
ASA
[
Applied Science and Analysis
]
Newsletter
5/1998 (2003). Also E. Lesho, D. Dorsey, and D. Bunner, “Feces, Dead Horses, and Fleas—Evolution of the Hostile Use of Biological Agents,”
Western Journal of Medicine
168 (1998): 512.

“Wow. Bang”
Personal communication with Stephen Turner, WaterAid, March 2007.

HIV, safe water, malaria, or nutrition
Arno Rosemarin,
EcoSanRes Program—Phase Two 2006–2010
(Eschborn: DWA, Hennef and GTZ, 2006), p. 9.

Ninety-two have never counted them
“The Eight Commandments,”
The Economist
, July 5, 2007.

Jack and Jill
WSSCC has recently updated its campaign. New images include a blindfolded man standing in front of a firing squad wall, but his executioners are holding glasses of water, not guns. The slogan reads “Dirty Water Kills.” Another shows sperm-shaped water droplets under the slogan “In some countries women risk rape by collecting water.” All campaign images are available from
http://www.wsscc.org
.

The Blair latrine
Peter Morgan, “Ecological Sanitation in Africa: A Compendium of Experiences,”
http://www.ecosanres.org/PM_Report.htm
.

179 flies a day
Andy Robinson, “VIP Latrines in Zimbabwe: From Local Innovation to Global Solution” (Nairobi, Kenya: Water and Sanitation Program—Africa Region, 2002), p. 2.

School enrollment increased
UNICEF, “Children and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: The Evidence,” Human Development Report Office Occasional Paper No. 50 (New York: UNDP, 2006), p. 3.

4. GOING TO THE SULABH

Longest surviving social hierarchy
Smita Narula,
Broken People: Caste Violence against India's “Untouchables”
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 24.

India's British rulers
The British created official posts of manual scavengers, and used scavengers to clean army cantonments and municipalities. Dry toilets abounded in all British-run environments. Gita Ramaswamy writes, “This is not to say the British invented caste or manual scavengers; rather they intervened specifically to institutionalize it.” Gita Ramaswamy,
India Stinking: Manual Scavengers in Andhra Pradesh and Their Work
(Pondicherry: Navayana, 2005), p. 6.

Between 400,000 and 1.2 million manual scavengers
Ramaswamy quotes figures from the Ministry for Social Justice and Empowerment, which calculated in 2002–2003 that there were 676,000 manual scavengers in India. In his foreword to
India Stinking
, Safai Karmachari Andolan leader Bezwada Wilson puts the total at 1.3 million. Ibid., pp. vi, ix.

10 million dry latrines
WSSCC,
Listening
(Geneva: WSSCC, 2004), p. 36.

Manual scavenging illegal
Narula,
Broken People
, p. 149.

The Constitution of India
Ibid., p. 149. Article 17 reads in full: “‘Untouchability' is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of ‘Untouchability' shall be an offense punishable in accordance with law.” Constitution of India, 1949, available from the Government of India's Ministry for Law and Justice at
http://lawmin.nic.in/coi.htm
.

Three men died of asphyxiation
22,237 Dalits die doing sanitation work every year. S. Anand, “Life Inside a Black Hole,”
Tehelka
, December 8, 2007.

Loses arm as a result
Stephanie Barbour, Tiasha Palikovic, Jeena Shah, and Smita Narula, “Caste Discrimination against Dalits or So-called Untouchables in India, Submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” (New York: Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, New York University/Human Rights Watch, 2007), p. 40.

Three Dalit women were raped
National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, “Alternate Report to the Joint 15th to 19th Periodic Report to the State Party (Republic of India) to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” (New Delhi: National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, 2006), p. 2.

Sit apart from other children
Ibid., p. 10.

Spade, Black, Dung, Horse
Ramaswamy,
India Stinking
, p. 17.

Fifteen duties for slaves
Ibid., p. 5.

Baiting of cesspit emptiers
The French royal ordinance of 1350 authorized laborers from all trades and guilds to become cesspit emptiers if they chose, and stipulated that “whosoever insults them or does them violence will be fined.” Monestier,
Histoires et Bizarreries Sociales des Excréments
, p. 100.

In a northwesterly direction
The Essenes, widely believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls, suffered for their good hygiene, according to recent research in the Scroll site of Qumran in the West Bank. Because Qumran's inhabitants designated a specified place as a latrine and buried their waste rather than following the Bedouin custom of open defecation (which meant feces dried out in the sun), they tramped fecal pathogens back into their camp. This could explain why only 6 percent of male corpses found in Qumran had survived beyond the age of forty, whereas in first-century Jericho, nine miles away, the rate was 49 percent. Alan Boyle, MSNBC, “Toilet Tied to Tale of Dead Sea Scrolls,” November 15, 2006.

Smell like thine own dung
J. G. Bourke,
Scatologic Rites of All Nations: A Dissertation upon the Employment of Excrementitious Remedial Agents in Religion, Therapeutics, Divination, Witchcraft, Love-Philters, etc., in all Parts of the Globe
(Washington, D.C.: W. H. Lowdermilk & Co., 1891), p. 143.

Fire an arrow
John Stackhouse, “Clean Revolution Begins with Out-house,”
Toronto Globe & Mail
, December 19, 1994.

15 feet away from habitation
Sulabh International,
Sulabh International Museum of Toilets
, n.d., p. 13.

A rough stick
Vitta Khandaka, Collection of Duties, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/vin/cv/cv.08x.than.html
.

The current chief justice
Chief Justice K. G. Balakrishnan, known to his friends as Bala, is the first Dalit to hold the post. Narenda Jadhav, chief economist of India's central bank, is another Dalit success story. They are the exceptions. Amelia Gentleman, “India's Untouchable Millionaire,”
Observer
, May 6, 2007; “Balakrishnan Takes Over as New CJI,”
The Hindu
, January 15, 2007.

Won't marry outside their own caste
Sagarika Ghose, “The Cult of the Sex Goddess,”
Guardian
, August 14, 2007.

When I first wrote about manual scavengers
Rose George, “These Indian Women Are Forced to Get Way Too Intimate with Their Bosses. And Not in a Good Way,”
Jane
, August 2003.