Toilets

Yesterday was a holiday.  You may have missed it.  It was World Toilet Day.  May sound pretty odd to you and you may even wonder why would there be a day to bring attention to the toilet?  In the US we do our best to avoid talking about toilets.  I still remember my young obsession with bathroom humor, foreshadowing my future career maybe.  I also remember my mother saying we don't talk about that in polite company.  She was right.  We don't talk about toilets and that makes it easy to forget that for 2.5 billion people they would gladly give up what little they have to be able to not talk or think about toilets. 

No I don't intend to use my blog to share bathroom humor.  I have grown past that.  Instead I will say that I celebrate all the toilet has meant to us and would mean to the rest of the world.  I hope after you read this you won't shy away from talking about toilets, but instead will roil against the situations that keep them from 1/3 of the world's population.  You may ask, from your comfortable home or even your bathroom, I don't judge where you read.  How in this day and age, where everyone has a cell phone and the internet, can 1/3 of the population be without sanitation?

Why I thank the toilet?

Thanks for letting me go to school and then to college.  For women without  access to sanitation they begin to miss school as soon as they hit puberty.  The poor conditions are compounded and often lead to illnesses that make concentrating on school work impossible and then inevitably they drop out.  In India alone 23% of girls drop out of school as soon as they hit puberty.  Thanks to the toilet I never had to think about this.  I had all the awkward concerns teenage girls have when they reach puberty, but  I never had to let that determine my educational opportunities.

Thanks for my health.  Improved control of infectious disease is listed as one of the10 greatest advances in public health.  And sanitation and clean drinking water are credited for the gain.  I don't have to worry about Cholera and a host of other diseases that routinely took the lives of people.  I may live to be 80, the current life expectancy in the US, because of the toilet.  Wow! makes you feel like giving it a good cleaning and a little pampering this week doesn't it?

Thanks for my way of life.  Because of the toilet I was able to get an education and then a job, that lets me blog about the role of the toilet in our privileged lives.  

Thanks for my safety.  Without the toilet women and girls have to venture far from home to find a suitable place to defecate.  In the middle of this already degrading process they are often raped and killed. 

Thanks for letting me enjoy nature.  I love to run along the rivers and lakes and I can because they are beautiful and clean.  I can breathe clean fresh air.  It would be a different experience if these same rivers and lakes were also an open channel for raw sewage. 

So my mother was right?  We don't talk about these things in polite company.  We don't talk about them at all.  We don't want to know these things.  As if knowing them is the difficult and painful part.  What about living them.  So I don't want you to talk about this just in polite company.  I want you to talk about it in the line at Starbucks.  I want you to casually ask the person in front of you at the grocery store buying toilet paper if they know that 2.5 billion people in the world don't have a toilet and that diarrhea is still the number one killer of children world-wide.  Then when you are done talking about it find out how to change it.  They can't wait anymore.