Fostering Dependence

During the lunch stop of the taxi-brousse ride from Toliara back to Fianar, I witnessed a sad phenomenon.  I was just standing outside, since I had snacks and didn’t want to eat at a hotely, and there was a man and his son standing next to the vehicle.  The kid was maybe 3 years old, although it’s hard to judge.  The man said to the child, “Bonjour, Madame”, trying to teach him how to say hello to foreigners in French.  It was kind of cute, and I though, “Oh good, teaching kids things in another language…that’s good.”.  I just smiled and maybe said bonjour.  However, I was quite dismayed to hear the next phrase he decided to teach the little kid for future run-ins with white people:  ”Donnez-moi l’argent, madame.”  (Give me money, Madame)  Rather than teaching his child a general language skill, or something useful, he was teaching his child how to beg from white people.  These people weren’t starving.   It was just a sad display of the attitude that many Malagasy people seem to have about vazahas.

There are plenty of children who beg in Fianar.  Leaving the grocery store there are always at least 2 that chase me for half a block before giving up.  It’s hard to tell their actual situations of course, but I’m convinced that many of them have been trained to beg out of habit rather than true need.  Why does this happen?  It seems that an attitude of dependency has permeated this country, and that many people learn to ask vazahas for help rather than learn how to help themselves.  I suppose one could look at the father teaching his child to beg as sort of a micro-view of the larger picture of development in general.  At the micro level, parents are teaching their children to beg from vazahas.  At the macro level, NGOs come and go, help with certain projects, but when they leave, it’s up to the Malagasy people and government to maintain sanitation or environmental standards (or whatever an organization has helped with).  The government definitely doesn’t always pick up the slack – after the FCE (train) rehabilitation project, the government has not made efforts to maintain it (or privatize it, another option).  There’s a dredge sitting in the port of Mananjary (maybe 40km from Manakara, but closer than that I think) that was bought with something like $100,000 of aide money with the aim of getting the port of Manakara up and running again.  The port in conjunction with the railway could be a very real way for people living between Fianar and the coast of Manakara to transport goods (thus helping income, food security, and general livelihoods), but the port is currently all but out of commission.  The dredge could get things moving, but it’s just been sitting in Mananjary apparently stuck in some sort of government/bureaucracy limbo, not helping anyone.

I’ve gone around in kind of a circle with this, but mostly I just hate to see a young generation that thinks rich white people are going to help them, and that it’s ok to just rely on that belief.

Brief thoughts about excrement

Upon arrival in Madagascar, general bathroom habits had to make a big change. My gut feeling about using a pit latrine was nervousness about missing the hole and making a big mess. Luckily, as long as your feet match the footplates, everything goes where it should, so any feelings of apprehension were soon gone. Another thing to note about Madagascar is that really, everywhere is a toilet. It’s not just men that pee in alleys here. It’s also a common site to see men just peeing on the side of the road without searching for properly camouflaging bushes. Many beaches (Manakara included, but not the beach I vacationed at) are not even safe to walk on barefoot for those wanting to avoid some sort of parasitic worm found in the sand due to locals treating the beach as a public toilet. I have read that in some areas (mostly coastal?) it is fady (culturally taboo – it’s also fady to wear red in sight of water in the Manakara area, eat pork in many places, or point directly at some monuments) to bury feces. This creates huge sanitation problems where latrines of some sort aren’t available.

In many village areas, there are long drop pit latrines (as opposed to composting). The pits are extremely deep, and strike me as pretty labor intensive to construct. They’re often plagued by flies, and I’m not sure what ultimately happens to the waste, or how it breaks down. It’s sure that they are by no means cement lined, and therefore I’d imagine they pose a problem with groundwater depending on their location.

Of course, many houses, businesses (including my office), and government buildings have Western, flush toilets as well (used mostly by the upper class and foreigners I’d imagine). Despite this being more sanitary, during the dry season there gets to be a water shortage in many places. The tap up in the Old City that gets turned on twice a day for everyone to fill up their buckets has only been available once a day lately because water’s starting to run short (the wet season starts soon). With this shortage in mind, it seems pretty silly to have flushing toilets. I suppose I could say the same for Arizona – if water’s going to run out at some point, why not revamp the waste disposal system?

At my own house, we have a composting latrine. Solid waste goes in the hole, which is covered by a plug. Urine drains out in front of you and exits into a soak pit that I believe also contains sawdust and ashes. Once the pit is full, it’ll be left to sit for awhile, and will eventually compost. Since it’s dry, it doesn’t take nearly as long as if both solid and liquid waste were in the same pit. Toilet paper will compost with the feces too. This latrine is not smelly at all (before I got here I was picturing something more like a smelly outhouse). It seems like about as environmentally friendly a shit processing system as could be found.

I came across this book review on slate.com today. The energy we put into disposing of excrement in the Western world is astronomical, as is the damage it does to the environment and human health. The picture painted is sort of an end of the world caused by poop scenario, but it really is something to think about. I ask myself, would it be realistic for households in the US to start using things like composting latrines instead of toilets? Perhaps jobs could be created when said pits need to be emptied. Surely the cost of hiring someone to pick up our composted human manure would be balanced by the money not spent on water for conventional toilets as well as an environmental credit of cleaner water that needs less treatment before hitting the tap.

Somebody tell Obama to put dealing with the financial crisis on hold and run with this. Joe the Plumber can become Joe the Latrine Emptier. This is huge.