So with some yummy treats, a sleeping bag, 5 pairs of underwear and some other miscellaneous things in tow, we shipped out. The first four days we spent constructing 3 things: a dry latrine, a ferrocement tank for rain water catchment and a system to reuse gray water. I’ll explain each one individually.
Here in Bolivia not everyone has access to water or money to pay for a bathroom. So they usually do one of two things: crap outside wherever they can find a tree or a bush, or in some of the nicer places they have pit latrines, which can range from just a hole in the ground surrounded by a curtain to a little shack built on top of a little concrete box for the poo to pile up in. Obviously neither is very sanitary, and the latter is better, but the main problem is that when it rains and the waters rise, the tanks flood and the poop is then flushed out and is out in the open. Kids play in it, and pigs eat it, and then people eat the pigs and get trikanosis, affectionately referred to as “Brainworm” here.
One of the solutions to this problem is to build what’s called a dry latrine. First, a concrete floor is poured and on top of it two tiny “rooms” are built. We built ours out of brick, but adobe works too depending on the local environment. The inside of the rooms are then plastered with a mixture of cement and a chemical that helps seal it all together and prevent the humidity from leaving. Then, a concrete “roof” is poured on top of the “rooms,” with two holes left in it, one on the top of each room. This is where the toilet will go. This roof will serve as the floor for the latrine. Walls are built up around and you’ve got yourself a bathroom. A special toilet is temporarily installed on one side of the latrine, allowing poo to drop into the “room” below but capturing urine and allowing it to run down a tube into an external catchment system...usually a large bottle or other plastic container. Keeping the urine and poo separate is one of the keys to the system. After doing your business, you put a cup full of drying material down the hole to help with composting. You can use lime, ash, corn husks, or sawdust. It is also necessary to knock down the pile of poo and mix it around once a week with a stick and throw in some extra drying material. Once the first room is full, you move the toilet to the other side and begin filling that room. Meanwhile, the first room is sealed off with a cap and the poo is allowed to decompose and turn into fertilizer. By the time the second side fills up (usually 6 months), the first side is ready to be cleaned out and is completely safe to touch and use as fertilizer. It is removed from a little door we built into the rooms with the bricks. Thus, it is completely sealed off from all moisture, it does not smell if used properly with drying material, and it provides you with fertilizer you can use for your garden or even sell as a little business enterprise. It didn’t strike me until the end of the day we were laying brick that we were in the middle of constructing a brick sh*t house. Needless to say I got a kick out of it.
They are trying to implement the latrines all over, but in can get tricky to get people to use them properly. Sometimes they don’t want to mix with their stick or can’t afford drying material (about 30 cents for 6 months worth or so) so they just go to waste. One of the biggest things they have tried to get across here is that it does absolutely no good to build things like this and just leave. The most important part is to do education and training so people understand the importance. One of the biggest differences with Peace Corps from other institutions is that we take the time to do this education. So many NGO’s come in and want to spend their money, so they build a bunch of these but don’t take any time to educate the community and the latrines without fail end up being used as storage or as chicken coops. We pride ourselves on providing sustainable changes, not just giving free handouts.
The LatrineOur second project was building a rainwater catchment system with a ferrocement tank. In places where it doesn’t rain much, it’s important to be able to conserve what little rain they do get. One of the ways of doing this is basically setting up a system of primitive gutters and let all the rainwater run into a tank for storage. Most of the roofs here are sheet metal, and gutters can be easily made by taking a piece of 3 inch PVC pipe, slicing down one side and sticking it on the end of the sheet metal and directing it to the tank. A picture may explain it better.
It was fun building the tank because I got to show off some of my well honed plastering and cement skills. Once we put up the metal frame, we had to stucco it three times, twice on the outside and once on the inside. Not a big deal back home, but here we’ve got limited resources, tools, and skills. First of all, we had to wash the gravel for the concrete base by hand...picture 10 gringos around a muddy hole washing buckets of rocks with dirty water...not quite the most fun I’ve had, but the scenery was nice. Also, we had to sift all of the sand through a screen to just get the fine stuff. Then we got to finally mix the concrete and cement up. I got to be on the inside when we were doing that layer and unfortunately for my friend James and our Bolivian mason Don Angel, I had what I can honestly say was the worst case of smelly gas I’ve ever had in my life...and that’s saying a lot. So picture three guys in a 10 foot diameter tank for about 4 hours, 2 getting asphyxiated from the raunchy stank escaping from my backside and me laughing my backside off, wishing my dad was there to say “Man, that stinks. Isn’t that neat?” Despite the stench, we got the inside layer up, waited for it to dry and again put up the sealant stuff that keeps the humidity out...more plastering but less farting this time around. It was fun to use the ol’ trowel again, but we were definitely lacking some key tools I’m used to having at home. Welcome to the Peace Corps.
Finishing the floor of the tank from the ladderOur third project was a gray water system. What is gray water, you may ask? There are two types of waste water, gray water and black water. Black water is anything with feces in it, which is poisonous and gray water is everything else...water from the kitchen, clothes washing, and even urine, which is sterile. Usually gray water is allowed to simply run onto the ground and in the water trenches along the road...which is a bad idea. Its obviously not sanitary for kids and dogs to be playing in this kind of wastewater. For example at my house, the water from the kitchen sink and our clothes washing sinks runs right out the back into one of these ditches. Our black water from our toilet is sent into a tank that screens out the solids, hanging onto them and letting the liquid disperse into the ground, which is about as good as you can ask. Sewers aren’t coming anytime soon to this community.
So they have developed a way to not only prevent this gray water from going to the ditches, but to put it to good use. All the gray water is captured from the household and piped into a little brick box...where anything solid sinks to the bottom and anything greasy floats to the top...whats left then flows into pipes that are used to irrigate a garden that you build. So technically every time you wash stuff down the sink, you’re irrigating your garden. We built our gray water system in the same place as our tank...which was a school. It was kind of tricky to get all the levels right but eventually it worked out and the water flowed like it should have.
I can’t go much further without mentioning the fact that at this point, one by one our group began to get sick. A few had food poisoning, there were about 4 with giardia and almost everyone else had unidentified stomach problems leading to unfriendly discharges from one end or the other, or both. After 10 days of traveling, only 2 of us remained completely unscathed, and one of them was me. Perhaps it’s the vitamins I’m taking (thanks MJ) or just Buckeye luck, but something was definitely going my way.
Despite being pretty tough work days, we had a pretty good time. We were all learning new things and hanging out in the evenings, talking about our possible sites and playing card games and what not. We even had a bonfire one night to celebrate the festival of San Juan, which is supposedly the coldest night of the year...we didn’t have marshmallows but one of our training directors named Armando played pretty much every Beatles song on the guitar as we all sang along...which was extremely fun. Thus ended the first part of our trip.
Giving a hand-washing talk to some kids at the school where we built the tank.
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