What do toilets tell us about people and places?
Think back to a time in your life when for the first time, you became aware that toilets different than those you were used to, exist.
For some of us, it may have been shocking simply to realise that differences among people go beyond skin colour and hair texture. For others, the experience may have been perplexing, amusing, unpleasant or even almost like a betrayal. For me, in a single moment, diversity went from abstract to downright practical.
Last summer, when we decided to head East for travel schooling our family, I knew that my daughters were about to have this, very experiential brush with diversity. One that often gets neglected as either a mere inconvenience (think, toilets in India) or an amusing technology (think, toilets in Singapore or Tokyo). However, I did not expect such an experience to shift something in me at a much deeper level, yet again.
As part of our travel education expedition, we recently stayed in Chiang Mai, Thailand for a month. I was delighted to find generally clean public toilets almost everywhere in this country. I was eager to show my daughters these new types of toilets wherever I had a chance because it is a very important lesson for my girls in their travel education. For now, they are simply amused by the variety of toilets. But I know that the idea that diversity exists is planted in their minds in a fundamental manner, in a way they will only grasp later on. And I was about to leave it at that…
But then, we travelled to Mae Sot, a district bordering Myanmar at the far Northwestern end of Thailand. We visited two of the four learning centres that our friend Tuttu has founded for children of unregistered Burmese migrants. The first, ‘Morning Glory 2’ has five brick-and-mortar toilets for 215 children, their teachers and staff. These toilets were clean but so wet with the traditional practice of using water, that my younger daughter preferred a mound of sand in a nearby forest.
I spent the journey from Morning Glory 2 to Tuttu’s next learning centre in Kuchioh, unable to shake off my concern over lack of adequate sanitation here despite the best efforts of the foundation which runs the school. Little did I realise that I had much more to learn. When we reached our next destination, I witnessed an elementary school that was nothing but a collection of bamboo huts. It had at best, makeshift bamboo toilets, no access to electricity and classes separated by curtains. And yet it was not the sanitation at school that kept me up that night.
I could not fathom how children who live in bamboo huts in the middle of sugarcane fields relieve themselves after school hours.
If you have seen a sugarcane field, you would understand how narrow the lanes are, how tall and dense the cane grows, how snake-infested it can be and how completely invisible someone who walks in any such mud-road would be. Now picture, a middle-school student making her way through one such lane to a remote part of the field to answer nature’s call. Her family has been given a threadbare bamboo hut in the field and not much else. It dawned upon me that it is only at school that these little children have access to any semblance of a constructed toilet.
All of a sudden, what I considered an important lesson for my kids in diversity, became my awakening about the extent of human disparity. Not only do toilets differ across different parts of the world, but also in some places
people must risk their lives each time they need to use the toilet
This difference in human practices transcends diversity. This is my shocking rendezvous with the heartbreaking disparity of human experience determined by where we are born.
