Down the drain. . . . .

"How was your trip?" friends keep asking us, when they see us for the first time since we got home last month.

I never know what to say.  It's hard to sum up 5 months of travel in a few brief words.  Especially since it was, well, a very strange trip.

The biggest reason I say so is that so many of our plans, especially plans to get together with old friends, fell through, often at the last minute.  People we were going to meet became ill -- one even had emergency open heart surgery to save his life -- or otherwise disappeared off our radar screen.

One of the strangest experiences was the non-meeting with a Rotarian who had long been seeking our help for a project to provide toilets for people's homes in his poor rural area.  There, all too many people have nowhere to go, except out in the field.  Sanitation is pretty much non-existent. Consequently, the rate of severe diarrhea among children is astronomical.

So, to prepare for our expected meeting with him, we studied up on cheap, low-tech toilets.

Our research culminated in a day-long seminar at Sulabh International, an NGO specializing in cheap, sustainable sanitation systems, headquartered in Delhi. That day, there were visitors from at least 5 countries, all there to learn what we could.

Here, visitors from Ghana and France
are taking the tour with me.

The basic concept is a two-pit pot,
where one pit gets filled while the
other sits empty.


When the first pit is full, a low-tech valve
(a chunk of rock or concrete), is shifted
to divert the, um, fresh materials into
the second pit.

While the second pit is in use, the stuff in
the first pit is composting into nice, safe
 fertilizer with significant monetary value
for farm use.

At left, an example of a valve.


At right, an inexpensive
example of the sort of
superstructure that can
 be used to provide
privacy.












At left, a fancier, doorless superstructure,
which also provides privacy, unless
someone like our French friend Joelle
is tall enough (and rude enough if
someone's actually inside) to peek in.

At right, another look at the layout of the two-pit
system.


And below, here's the silly souvenir the Sulabh
people offered to each of us: a ball of composted
"waste matter," safely aged into fertilizer, and then,
for fun, glued into a hard ball that can be bounced
off a concrete floor.  I was the only taker of the
unusual gift.

So, after a full day of learning how the system can be constructed and maintained -- with a break in the middle for a group tour of the in-house International Toilet Museum -- Rob and I were jazzed about the upcoming meeting with the toilet project Rotarian.

Sadly, however, our friend has apparently lost all interest in the project.  Our meeting never happened.  He left town, and we've never heard from him since.  So, that project went... down the drain.

For more photos -- including some toilet cartoons from the humor section of the toilet museum -- you can check out my Facebook page.