The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  In Buguruni, not far from the waste stabilization ponds, I am trying to talk to some women who are standing behind a wooden stall and selling nothing that I can see. I am using an iPod to record and lay it on the stall. One woman reaches for it and therefore so do I, but she’s only moving it away from the drips from the straw roof, and I feel prejudiced and terrible, but my prejudice is not unusual. City planners routinely use the excuse that slums are havens of criminality, usually just before they bulldoze them, when actually slum dwellers tend to be more exploited by criminal gangs than anyone else.

  The women don’t want to talk because I’ve asked them how they empty their latrine pit. Richard steps in because he understands what the problem is. He says, “We’re not from the government,” and they laugh with relief and tell me how they would empty their pit if it got full, which is illegally. The most common method used to empty pits, at least by people who don’t believe in tipping shit into the streets, is to use a kutapisha. The word comes from the Swahili word tapika, meaning “to vomit.” A literal translation would be “one who makes the pit vomit.” Most literature I read about Tanzanian pit emptiers refers to them more delicately as “frogmen”—because they dive into pits, presumably—though not one person I meet uses that term even in translation. The kutapisha is a mythical figure. Ask a Temeke resident where to find one, and they will respond with the equivalent of seeing a man about a dog. “Oh, you ask around.” Or, “You go somewhere really poor and ask anyone. Anyone who is desperate enough will do it.”

  Here is how to empty a Tanzanian latrine pit. Take yourself, and a colleague if you can pay one, to the pit in question. It can be during daytime, though night may be better, as your client may be embarrassed by your activity and your activity is illegal. First, take a sledgehammer to the concrete latrine squatting slab that covers the pit. Pour in five kilograms of salt to liquefy the hard layers at the bottom. Leave for one to two days. When you return, bring a can of kerosene and pour it over the contents to mask the smell. Put on boots if you’ve got them, but you probably won’t have gloves, and start digging. It should take a day at least. Do not be alarmed if you find fetuses, and watch out for sharp objects and syringes. When you’ve finished, decant the muck into another hole and install a new slab. For all this work, you can charge the sum of 95,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $80). Replacing the slab costs extra. It won’t be taxed, because you are doing a job unrecognized by, but tolerated by, city authorities. If you didn’t do it, no one else would.

  This information is worth money because it comes from a professional. With some effort, Richard has tracked down a kutapisha named Mawazo. He’s a young man, with smart trousers and confidence, and he talks freely as our little delegation stands in front of his family passport toilet, long enough for the children who gather at any conversation to get bored and move off to find nothing else to do. It’s good of Mawazo to take the time, because this is the rainy season, when the water table is high, pits fill, and he is most in demand.

  Mawazo doesn’t use the word kutapisha. He says people call him a kupakuwa. After some discussion—“a serving removal man; a person who takes things out of one dish and puts them into another”—this is finally translated as pit-scooper or ladler. The scooper doesn’t mind his job because the money is good and he is in demand. Also, though I’ve heard reports to the contrary, he doesn’t have to work at night. Why should he? He has nothing to be ashamed of.

  Sugden is impressed. “You’re doing an important job for public health,” he tells him, though Mawazo looks bemused. But it is an imperfect and possibly dangerous solution. By decanting the pit contents into another hole nearby, the kutapisha method keeps fecal contamination in the community where it can easily seep into groundwater. Also, Mawazo only empties six pits a month in high season and the other full pits must be going somewhere. Sugden had another idea. If they had a service that was more affordable, that avoided breaking the slab, and that was more accessible for these back alleys, maybe people would use it. Perhaps they would use the Gulper.

  Outside the conventional toilet industry, the world of sanitation does not lack innovation. There are thousands of latrine designs; countless varieties of wastewater treatment methods; sewer robots and reverse-osmosis membranes. There are ultralight wilderness toilets that can be carried in a backpack, and Jiffy bags of crystals for drivers stuck in traffic to pee in. There is even an enterprising retired Navy commander called Virginia Ruth Pinney who has taken the stinkiest compound in feces—skatole—and weaponized it, according to U.S. patent 6,242,489. Fecal stink bombs are now available as nonlethal weapons for “riot control, to clear facilities, to deny an area, or as a taggant,” according to the arms control group the Sunshine Project. But not many of these innovations had the same research and development process as the Gulper. According to Sugden, this involved, “Oh, about five pints in the pub.”

  The Gulper is a manual latrine-emptying pump. In Sugden’s vision, it could be carried by one man, who would transport the pump and the emptied pit contents, on a simple motorbike. First he needed someone to make it and he knew who to ask. Suggy—his school nickname—was still friends with Stephen Ogden, a farmer in Yorkshire whom Suggy calls Oggy, who gave up dairy farming when it became cheaper to kill a cow than send for the vet, and now does fabricating instead. I later go to meet Oggy at his farm near Bradford. It perches on a patch of ruralness that takes you by surprise, coming out of nowhere at the top of a normal built-up hill of houses and cul-de-sacs. There is a large workshop, some green fields, and a Methodist church that his grandfather built in the farmyard, and that still gets a two-strong congregation on Sundays.

  Oggy is all a Yorkshire farmer should be: dry of manner and of wit with a quiet strength to offset Sugden’s energy. Suggy is untethered; Oggy is grounded, enough to say immediately, when I ask if he’d like to go to Tanzania to see the Gulper in action, “No. No chance. Why would I?” The genesis of the Gulper comes from the fusion of this friendship. It began one sunny April day in 2006 when Oggy was standing by the gates to his farm and Suggy arrived by car. “He must have talked for two hours straight about shit,” says Ogden. “I hadn’t seen him for a while so after a bit I said, ‘By the way, how’s your wife and children?’”

  Sugden explained what he wanted. He showed Ogden some pictures of water pumps to inspire him. They Googled for some more. And after a few months, Oggy had a pump and Suggy got testing. First, they tried it on a barrel of cow muck, but it kept getting clogged. Oggy changed the valve to a hinged one (he tells me this as if it’s impossible that I wouldn’t understand engineering), and Suggy took it to Tanzania and tried it on some pits. The second pit caused some trouble. “There was lots of cloth in there,” Sugden tells me, “and plastic bags from flying toilets. We started pumping and a pair of underpants got stuck in the second valve. We couldn’t push it up or down so we had to take it to bits. I looked down at my shoes and my hands covered in shit and thought, oh well, all in the name of research.”

  Oggy fitted the pump with an underpants-proof grill, and Gulper 3 was tested, again on cow muck. “I can still see Suggy teetering above the manure with a stick to stir it and make it thicker.” They put in drier cow manure to account for other pit latrine contents, to give the Gulper a proper challenge. It worked.

  The Gulper—so named because “that’s what it sounded like”—may be nothing fancier than a simple stirrup pump with underpants-related features, but it’s good enough for several copies to have been ordered by Oxfam. Ogden is bemused by this, but he made the first few pumps. He won’t need to do them again, because the point of the Gulper is that it can be copied. I see this attitude often in sanitarians. Dr. Pathak of Sulabh; Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas; the two Steves. None has applied for patents. None wants to remove his useful ideas into expensive inaccessibility. This generosity has a fine historical precedent: Dr. John Snow, the great Victorian doctor who identified the source of cholera, never patented any of his medical advances despite bei
ng a good enough ether practitioner to be requested by Queen Victoria when she gave birth. Patenting is daft, according to the two Steves. It defeats the purpose. “The idea,” says Sugden, “is to develop something a small-scale sector can afford and adopt. If you patent it, it’s expensive and they can’t adopt it. It has to be simple and rugged and bomb-proof.” The main technology was ready. Now he had to figure out how to make a business out of it.

  Sugden’s Gulper project comes under a banner called “sanitation marketing.” This concept arose from work done at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the early 1990s and derives from the more established discipline of social marketing, which was developed in the 1960s. To an outsider, social marketing might seem like common sense, but in the development world, it was a breakthrough. If poor people were treated as consumers, and if things they needed—malaria nets, oral rehydration salts—could be transformed into desirable marketable products, then perhaps poor people could be made to want things they needed. Sanitation marketing does the same for toilets. Understand how and why people buy latrines, then make it much easier for them to do so. In official Sugden language, this translates into “to understand the natural acquisition curve and accelerate it.”

  One of the foundation stones of sanitation marketing was Dr. Marion Jenkins’s research. During the early 1990s, Jenkins spent several years asking the people of 520 villages in Benin what made them buy a latrine. She discovered that “as with any innovation, households will not adopt in a uniform manner and the categories of innovator, early adopter, late adopter, and laggard are as relevant to latrine building in developing countries as they are to the adoption of compact disc players or mobile phones in developed countries.” Other studies found that consumer durables introduced into the United States before the Second World War took about eighteen years to reach “take-off,” or proper commercial success. Communications and technology have since brought down this acquisition period to about six years in developed countries. In poorer markets, the timescale remains prewar. The goal of sanitation marketing is to take that eighteen-year period and speed it up using conventional marketing techniques like research, promotion, and improved supply chains. In short, in the words of a staffer at the WSSCC, the goal is to make toilets like toothpaste—widely available, cheap enough, and wanted.

  In Dar, Sugden’s goal was to make the Gulper part of a small business venture. He picked a small enterprise in Temeke called Tedegro that already provided decent garbage-removal services. WaterAid would buy the transport and the tank and provide the Gulper. Tedegro had to make the business work.

  It sounds straightforward. So had WaterAid’s first venture into sanitation marketing in Dar, in the densely populated low-income area of Keko Mwanga B. The idea was to make toilets more available, so why not set up a toilet shop? It would be staffed by a team of fundis (masons) and offer a select few toilet designs. It would be accessible, with a location on Keko Mwanga B’s main thoroughfare (not really a street, as it turns to mud in the rains). WaterAid followed the principles of sanitation marketing first by doing its homework. A market research study was commissioned that asked the residents of Keko what they wanted in a toilet. They said they were tired of their toilets, which were foul and unhygienic. They said they wanted something to change because even if they had latrines, their ground-floor houses still suffered when neighbors emptied their pits illegally. “What’s the point of having a toilet,” they asked reasonably, “when shit still runs through the kitchen?” They said how sick they were of treading on plastic bags that were helicopter toilets, crash landed on their path. A toilet shop was a great idea. Of course they’d use it.

  WaterAid went ahead with the project. A couple of demonstration toilets were built. But when I visit Keko a year on, a toilet fundi tells a gloomy tale. People may have had the intention to buy toilets, but intention isn’t a sale. “Most people in the report thought the toilet center would be providing free toilets. The ones who got demonstration toilets had to pay a little money and so now everyone thinks they can get a toilet like that by contributing an iron sheet or a door.” In fact, as Sugden tells me, the toilets were too expensive. Because the cheapest model was still $270, it offered no advantage over what was already available. Keko’s project may have failed, but it gave Sugden an idea. He estimated that 62 percent of the cost of the latrine went to digging the pit, lining the hole, and casting the latrine squatting slab. If the cost of the toilet were to be reduced, then the pit had to get smaller, too. The Gulper system would not only be able to access narrow slum alleyways but it would be more affordable because it would offer customers the option of only emptying part of their pits. Sugden calls this “a pay as you go approach.”

  Tedegro’s boss, a man called Mohando, is an ex-government official. Consequently, he has good connections, which smooth the running of his garbage disposal business. Its headquarters consist of a tiny wooden shack on a slum street in Temeke, where the Gulper is temporarily serving as a coat peg. Mohando has agreed to run the Gulper business in principle, but first he needs the nuts and bolts. Sugden has come to Dar to help source the equipment, and I tag along. Not from any interest in Tanzanian aluminum factories, but because I want to see how a big vision—to remove the seas of shit that drown so many cities—can be built from little things. The complexities of urban planning make my head spin. But I can grasp a tank, a motorbike, and a pump.

  A piki piki—a motorbike with attached trailer—has been sourced in a suburb of Dar. Finding the right tank to attach to the trailer is trickier. Aluminum is the first suggestion, but after several hours of searching, Sugden learns that there are no fundis in Dar who know how to weld it. The mood is demoralized and lunch is suggested. Richard proposes a restaurant that is “conducive.” I don’t know what it’s conducive for, but probably not for four men to earnestly calculate how much excrement the residents of Temeke produce. Once seated at the table, Sugden gets out his mobile phone and does his sums. One million families, with six people per family on average, producing 200 grams of matter per day on average. That makes 140,000 kilograms (154 tons). It would take 23 tankers a day to get rid of all that, or 280 trips a day by the piki piki to the waste stabilization ponds. To break even, they need to calculate the number of trips that can be made (five, probably) and a decent salary for the piki piki man (5,000–8,000 shillings a day).

  Other considerations must be made. The tank should not be transparent “because we don’t want people to see the shit slopping around.” Sugden has told me the story of the early Gulper experiments, when they emptied the pit contents into dark-colored plastic barrels and closed them too tightly. Dark attracts heat; excrement produces gas and pressure. The tanks exploded all over Sugden, and the WaterAid driver who had to take him back to the office has yet to get the smell out of his car or to forgive him. With this in mind, Mohando is worried about pressure. Should the tank be totally filled? Will it give? He asks Sugden with the expectation of a man asking an expert. Sugden is an expert, but only so far. There’s so much we don’t know about shit, he says sometimes. So much to learn. He tells Mohando the truth. “I don’t know. This is new. You’ll have to experiment.”

  They order lunch and keep calculating. Other pit-emptying arrangements have been tried in Dar and elsewhere. The Vacutug, a gas engine–powered pump, was devised in 1996 by UN-Habitat. But it only travels at walking speeds, says Sugden, “so it can take ten minutes to empty the pit and two hours to take to the waste stabilization ponds.” The MAPET was a human-powered pump, but it required three men to operate it, making for punishing running costs (in Mozambique, 73 percent of overheads were salaries). I see a MAPET standing stationary on a Dar street and hear that its business is bad.

  Sugden thinks the Gulper will beat that. It travels at 50 mph, enabling much quicker round-trips. The answer is in the depth of the pit. The piki piki could offer more flexible options: two barrels emptied, or four, with scale pricing. “It needs to be a profitable enough busin
ess for them to get another piki piki,” says Sugden, “and to pay for promotion and marketing, but they can’t do that until this gets off the ground. It’s a chicken and egg situation.”

  In Dar, I sit on a plastic bench in the yard of Simba Plastics, one of East Africa’s biggest plastic manufacturers, and suppliers of the ubiquitous rainwater-collecting SimTanks that dot Dar’s rooftops. The Gulper gang is hidden behind some water butts, sourcing a plastic tank to fit the trailer. They find one that is perfect and break out in smiles, even the gloomy Tedegro boy who has said nothing for two days. Their enthusiasm is great, but so are the obstacles. Even if the business does work, it can only transport its waste to the already loaded waste stabilization ponds, where it will probably be dumped in the sea or in landfill. “You have to make a choice,” says Sugden. “The argument is, what’s worse, contaminating the environment or contaminating human settlement. Obviously the answer is we want to do neither, but it’s a very difficult choice.” Pinned to the notice-board at WaterAid’s offices in Dar is a cartoon of a man standing by his hut at the base of a cliff, on the top of which a huge boulder is poised to fall on him, while another man tells him, “Of course your main problem is nitrates in your water.” Priorities. Another cartoon shows two young men standing in front of a sign telling them to prevent cholera by washing their hands before they eat. “That doesn’t apply to us,” says one to the other. “We don’t have any food.” “No,” agrees his friend, “and we don’t have any water either.”

  Sitting on my bench next to some giant Coke bottles—Simba makes soft drink containers too—I consider that solving sanitation is as complicated as it seems simple. It requires the juggling of priorities and budgets. It needs the reform of some local governments and the education of others, like Hanje’s shortsighted ward officers. I think of how I have got a habit by now of asking all the sanitation professionals I meet how to solve the sanitation problem. I want a magic bullet. Nobody has one. They suggest flexibility is the answer. Adapting solutions to the context. Trial and error, and hoping for fewer errors. I think, can a pump with an underpants-proof grill really do any good? The field of sanitation is littered with pilot projects that die soon after birth. Other manually operated emptying systems—Micravac, Maquineta, Minivac—have never gone beyond the trial stage. At one point during the search, as the rain poured down, Sugden said with no noticeable emphasis, “We are chasing dreams.”