So Thanksgiving and Christmas and the new year are all rolling by without much written here about it, so... oh, and also I have what is becoming an absurdly big post about my bike trip, whice people probably dont really care about that much, so itll go up backdated later.
Well, thanksgiving for us was pushed back by several weeks. I spent the actual day of thanksgiving in the village, not doing really anything that resembled holiday stuff, but it was a good time to use as an excuse to relax a bit.
The saturday after was Tabaski, the grand holiday which here involves great sheep slaughtering. Last year I broke out my new camera and took a ton of pictures of the day. This year, I chilled with the old men who were mostly playing cards. I purposely missed the slaughtering and ended up missing about all the butchering too. By the time lunch came around I realized I had taken basically no pictures but wasnt really in the mood to start then. It was like a very chill time of eating that wasnt as great as I remembered from last year, but nice enough. That night there was a big soiree at this fenced in area set up next to the school. They had a generator and huge speakers that blasted music until nearly sunrise for two days. This year that all happened about a hundred meters from my hut, it was not a great time for good sleep.
The other unfortunate part of the holiday was the meat. Even after the first night, eating it for lunch and again for dinner, was something my stomache did not appreciate. I wasnt sick at least but it felt mostly like something was slowly twisting my digestive organs into pretzels. Then we had the meat again for lunch and dinner on sunday. Then more on monday. And more tuesday. Wednesday I was so happy to see it absent, joyous that it hadnt killed me. And then we had more meat on Thursday and I thought i was going to throw up just from the smell. I came out ok in the end. But still, keep in mind I am in a village. We have no electricity, no refrigeration, no ice. The meat is just left out in chunks on a concrete shelf or on the floor in a small metal roofed cooking hut that the air for the most part has been replaced with flies. I try to avoid going near that building after holidays.
Anyway, so then, after my big ole bike trip, I got back to site on the 23rd. Most of my holiday plans were made pretty last minute. I hosted two voluteers that day, they were coming from Tamba and were headed to Saly, just north of Mbour, to spend Xmas with a small group there. Also that day, an American young woman named Ruth came to the village. She is working with the large garden in my village that is owned by a guy from Dakar. Surprisingly she is staying in Louly for about a month, living in my house even, with my family.
Anyway, so then I went to the beach with a different group for Christmas. We got a house up in Popenguine and had an amazing time. There were maybe more than a dozen of us for the actual day of Christmas, some were there earlier than others, some, including me, left later than most. We grilled food on the beach, later made an amazing roast and other food that was all fantastic. We even did white elephant- I got a platic gun which i promptly broke trying to get it working and an inflatable Santa with a squeeking foot which I gave as a present to the people of Popinguine who would surely appreciate the off-season holiday spirit more than the people of Louly...
A day or two after Christmas was tamxarit, a holiday here marking the Islamic new year. Last year I was in the village to see it but this time I missed it, though there is not really too much to see till nighttime anyway and these days I like to sleep after sunset. Yeah, I know, I have gotten really lame.
Then after a couple days in the village again I went up to Dakar for New Years. Though I didnt really do much but sit at the regional house, which in fact is the same thing I did last year. But there was a lot of people out in the city and we say and heard a huge amount of fireworks and noisemakers the whole night and into the next day.
Anyway, now I have been in the village a lot, trying to get just about everything done at once and for once actually accomplishing some of it. I will write up a good post later on the latrine progress. It is progressing!
Developments in Progress!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Composting Possibilities
Ok, so this is a long long overdue response to inquiries I recieved from several people on the subject of composting latrines. I had started writing a post about it ages ago, then stopped and wanted to do more research on it, then forgot about it amidst other work, then remembered it again to look further into it, then i forgot to write up a response, and now I am back at it again, for real this time.
So, lets see. There are several ways that a composting toilet can work. But basically the idea is to limit wasted water, even maybe separating liquid waste from solid, to prevent the spread of pathogens, and to manage the solid waste and aiding decomposistion until it is ready to be used out in the fields or gardens.
Now, for our latrines. The idea of public latrines was brought up and floated about the village for a while before being nearly unanimously voted down. What people wanted, and understandably, was for each family to have their own latrine to clean and manage. Each household getting a latrine meant an emphasis on the utility and minimal resources and something easily incorporated into the already existing village layout. This meant pit latrines topped with a turkish toilet, aka a hole. Now this design works in its simplest form in most parts of the country, all you need to do is put a slab of concrete with a hole all reinforced with rebar over the pit and voila, your very own latrine. Our soil is super sandy in our area and so we are forced to modify the design slightly. We have to cement the walls of the pit, or as we are doing, brick it in. Also, we could have had the hole in the center of the slab, but this would need extra cement and rebar. Cheaper than that is to make a solid slab and fix a pipe to the side that can run to whatever one wants to have at the elbow bend, turkish toilet or a fancy seat or whatever. There will also be a 2m pipe coming from the corner going straight up, acting as a ventilation stack.
So then, with such a design, once it is filled, five or ten years from now depending on the size of the family and all that, a new pit can be dug and cemented for relatively minimal cost, and the slab and pipes can be moved over to that one. Then what to do with all that junk? I had been thinking about this from the begining though explaining it to the community has proved a bit challenging. They have little ideas about the usefulness of compost, but they do know about spreading manure in gardens and around field crops, so there is a base of knowledge.
One option, of course, is to simply do nothing with it, leave it there. This in fact opens up some other avenues of waste disposal. What can we do with these old razor blades, throw them down the latrine. What about broken glass, this old rusted metal or barbed wire? Even more dangerous, all these old batteries that just lay around in the sun and break open and invite young children to put them in their mouths. This seems such an obvious and immediate solution to this growing hazordous trash problem that for a while it seemed just easier to advocate that then try and push any other kind of strategy.
But doing composting is also an excellent benifit to the comunity and to the environment. One issue though is that the layout of the the latrines themselves does not yeild itself particularly well to making efficient compost. There is no way to stir, to aeorate the solid waste. While it may not be that hard to add good imputs like sawdust, this is not available in the village and might not be stustainable to try and push its use village wide, especially if people would have to go and buy it from a nearby town.
So I think I can explain the different sides of it to each family as we go. My plan all along has been to include some health lessons family by family about proper handwashing techniques, about where disease comes from, and the importance of having a clean environment. Then people can decide for themselves if they would like to try and see how the composting option works. Once their latrine is full, a new pit is dug and they can should leave the other pit, covered in grass for example, for several months or maybe a year for the cold compost process to break down the waste. Then they can empty the pits and use it as compost, as fertilizer, wherever it is needed in their gardens or in thier fields.
And then thats about that. Honestly any more complicated approach may work on a public latrine basis, but that is not what people want here. People do need latrines, any latrines, because now there is nothing. I will do my best to present all the information I have avaliable to them and explain it particularly to village representatives who can pass that information along after PCVs are gone. If a family wants to just throw trash down into it, it may fill up a little faster, but after it is full they can dig them selves a new one and the old one will decompose on its own and can be buried. If they want to be brave and try the compost thing, if they can get over the stigma of where it all came from, then they can go for that too, maybe not in the most efficient way but they have the basic tools and can do it for an added benifit of soil quality and a healthier environment.
So, lets see. There are several ways that a composting toilet can work. But basically the idea is to limit wasted water, even maybe separating liquid waste from solid, to prevent the spread of pathogens, and to manage the solid waste and aiding decomposistion until it is ready to be used out in the fields or gardens.
Now, for our latrines. The idea of public latrines was brought up and floated about the village for a while before being nearly unanimously voted down. What people wanted, and understandably, was for each family to have their own latrine to clean and manage. Each household getting a latrine meant an emphasis on the utility and minimal resources and something easily incorporated into the already existing village layout. This meant pit latrines topped with a turkish toilet, aka a hole. Now this design works in its simplest form in most parts of the country, all you need to do is put a slab of concrete with a hole all reinforced with rebar over the pit and voila, your very own latrine. Our soil is super sandy in our area and so we are forced to modify the design slightly. We have to cement the walls of the pit, or as we are doing, brick it in. Also, we could have had the hole in the center of the slab, but this would need extra cement and rebar. Cheaper than that is to make a solid slab and fix a pipe to the side that can run to whatever one wants to have at the elbow bend, turkish toilet or a fancy seat or whatever. There will also be a 2m pipe coming from the corner going straight up, acting as a ventilation stack.
So then, with such a design, once it is filled, five or ten years from now depending on the size of the family and all that, a new pit can be dug and cemented for relatively minimal cost, and the slab and pipes can be moved over to that one. Then what to do with all that junk? I had been thinking about this from the begining though explaining it to the community has proved a bit challenging. They have little ideas about the usefulness of compost, but they do know about spreading manure in gardens and around field crops, so there is a base of knowledge.
One option, of course, is to simply do nothing with it, leave it there. This in fact opens up some other avenues of waste disposal. What can we do with these old razor blades, throw them down the latrine. What about broken glass, this old rusted metal or barbed wire? Even more dangerous, all these old batteries that just lay around in the sun and break open and invite young children to put them in their mouths. This seems such an obvious and immediate solution to this growing hazordous trash problem that for a while it seemed just easier to advocate that then try and push any other kind of strategy.
But doing composting is also an excellent benifit to the comunity and to the environment. One issue though is that the layout of the the latrines themselves does not yeild itself particularly well to making efficient compost. There is no way to stir, to aeorate the solid waste. While it may not be that hard to add good imputs like sawdust, this is not available in the village and might not be stustainable to try and push its use village wide, especially if people would have to go and buy it from a nearby town.
So I think I can explain the different sides of it to each family as we go. My plan all along has been to include some health lessons family by family about proper handwashing techniques, about where disease comes from, and the importance of having a clean environment. Then people can decide for themselves if they would like to try and see how the composting option works. Once their latrine is full, a new pit is dug and they can should leave the other pit, covered in grass for example, for several months or maybe a year for the cold compost process to break down the waste. Then they can empty the pits and use it as compost, as fertilizer, wherever it is needed in their gardens or in thier fields.
And then thats about that. Honestly any more complicated approach may work on a public latrine basis, but that is not what people want here. People do need latrines, any latrines, because now there is nothing. I will do my best to present all the information I have avaliable to them and explain it particularly to village representatives who can pass that information along after PCVs are gone. If a family wants to just throw trash down into it, it may fill up a little faster, but after it is full they can dig them selves a new one and the old one will decompose on its own and can be buried. If they want to be brave and try the compost thing, if they can get over the stigma of where it all came from, then they can go for that too, maybe not in the most efficient way but they have the basic tools and can do it for an added benifit of soil quality and a healthier environment.
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