July 2012 - Sweating it out in Indonesia

Food for the Hungry www.fh.org  had been discussing a trip to the Philippines with me, but a series of mishaps including a volunteer who broke a knee cap, prevented that from happening.   I still hope to go the the Philippines some day, but FH made an opening for me to teach an introduction to WASH on a trip to Indonesia.  There were about seven of us, but I was the only one with WASH experience.  Realizing that this could be the only WASH training the indigenous partner would receive for some time, I  spent a great deal of time preparing a curriculum.  It turned out to be one of my most memorable trips in many ways. 

   Shortly after we arrived, one of our hosts suggested we kick around a soccer ball indoors. We drove quite a while until we came to an open soccer field.    We kicked the ball around and then a bunch of guys showed up in yellow jerseys.     We were given red jerseys and found ourselves in the middle of a game... and then it started raining.   It was supposed to be the dry season, but in 20 minutes the field was flooded as we played on.  The guys on the other team didn't speak English and I didn't know a word of Indonesian, but it was all very friendly.  What a great time!
  The next morning I was told that two of the FH staff were going to show me some thing.   We drove for about an hour or two.

Then we came to a village where we parked.    We walked a while until we came to a dock along a river.   We waited a while in sweltering heat until a ferry showed up. We sat on the roof for an hour as the ferry chugged its way to a fishing village where the river met the ocean.  We toured the village and even got to see a household latrine.   It was a hole in the floor.   With most of the village on pillars, the tide was supposed to serve as the sewer system.   What a horrible solution!
We observed people with serious skin rashes and sewage floating between the homes.   There was sewage standing in the school yard where a child was wading.  Unfortunately, with ground level below water level much of the time, the pit latrines I had learned to build were not viable.  A dry composting latrine might have made sense but the cost of transporting materials was prohibitive.  Two of the volunteers agreed to help me teach as best they could.  On Monday, we started class and were surprised to learn that almost every one of our students were FH staff with college degrees.

There used to be a statistic from the WHO that said something to the effect that childhood deaths from diarrhea were reduced by 20% with safe water alone, 30% with hygiene alone, and 35% with sanitation alone -- but if you combine all three with holistic WASH the death rate was reduced by 65% .    These students totally got it!  
We went to an inland village where we built a latrine slab and watched a "teachback" wherein our students taught the disease paths and disease path blocking lesson to village leaders.    It raised some interesting discussion.   Then our students taught about 30 kids how to wash hands with a tippy tap. I am always amazed by "God things" that happen on these trips.   At the graduation ceremony, one of the students asked me if the people in the fishing village could simply poop into a bucket (essentially a chamber pot).   After giving it some thought, I realized that there is a badly needed solution.. Indonesia has something like 17,000 islands, so the fishing village is not a unique situation.    Modifying the chamber pot idea, they could allow effluent from the bucket to pass through to the sea through a tube while retaining the sludge for composting.  There is a lot more to this idea and contamination could be reduced even further, but I have been unsuccessful trying to find an NGO willing to test the idea.  I built one in Uganda later.   They liked the idea but have given me no feedback.   A safe water solution that should be fabulous in Indonesia is rain water harvesting.   They could basically collect water runoff from their roof into a tank before it gets contaminated.