Digging holes in the ground to stay healthy

“People enter the bush,” he says, when they have to answer the call of nature. Their farmlands and tiny streams snaking through dry land have taken the most of it.The ride to Lulawan is 15 minutes beyond beaten paths and beyond a partly collapsed bridge, across a woman sheltering from the baking sun in the […]

“People enter the bush,” he says, when they have to answer the call of nature. Their farmlands and tiny streams snaking through dry land have taken the most of it.
The ride to Lulawan is 15 minutes beyond beaten paths and beyond a partly collapsed bridge, across a woman sheltering from the baking sun in the shade of a tree, sheep grazing lazily in the sun while a pickup laden with straw trundles past.
Silos waiting to be filled with harvest grains dot green fields browning in the sun. It is prime country for open defecation.
But Lulawan’s residents have committed themselves to ending open defecation this December, under a Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) project by the United Nations Children Fund, funded by the European Union. In recent months, individual households have begun building toilets for the first time in Lulawan.
“Let everybody dig their toilet so that disease will not kill our children [when contamination gets into drinking water],” Lawan says. But he is yet to start his family’s toilet because the family spends a better part of their energy bringing in the harvest this season.
More than 30 families have begun the basics, digging rectangular holes in the rocky ground at the back of their dwellings. Once dug, the holes will be reinforced with an old tyre, a bit of asphalt and a base of sand. Then comes the typical hole carved from wood, shaped from plastic—the spout to collect faeces.
Millions of homes and Nigerians lack this basic facility. Some 37 million Nigerians defecate in the open, and up to 37% of residents across rural Nigeria have no access to improved sanitation facilities, according to a 2011 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey done by the National Bureau of Statistics.
Lami Samwan, a mother of seven, has dug her toilet, but the work is ongoing. Until it is finished, she will focus on maintaining the best hygiene she can manage to keep disease away from her compound, she says.
None of her seven children has had diarrhoea, dysentery or cholera commonly linked with contaminated food and water, and Samwan wants to keep it that way.
“The way I clean now is different from before when I didn’t know the importance,” she says. “Now I have to do it to prevent disease. I can carry on doing it, and I don’t need anyone else to tell me.”
“What we do is about behavioural change,” says Kingsley Okla, UNICEF’s consultant for WASH in Shendam. “We don’t just come and tell the people this and that. We use participatory tools, and at the end people will realize what their lifestyle is and demand for change.”
That’s what’s called “triggering” in development project language—and letting the community push its own agenda, including setting its target date to end open defecation.
Lulawan is running its business, with little monitoring from mobilization officers like Pringwap Nyelom.
Met with defecation on farmlands, it was his job to make the village realize it was living on its faeces, Nyelom says.
“They realized that what they were doing was not good for their health. They realized their entire community was being covered by their shit. That was how they realized what they were doing was wrong.”
Of Plateau’s 17 council areas, only Shendam and Riyom, qualified to host the project, according to Michael Pam, general manager of Plateau’s Rural Water and Sanitation Authority, the state partner in the WASH project.
“There were criteria for selection and it was self selection. Data were presented by each local government to show what they were able to do for the past years and a committee was set up,” says Pam. “It was devoid of government interference completely.”
It faced a hiccup after signing the agreement with EU in 2002—when  RUWASSA itself was established in 2001—and lost the project to Jigawa in 2005.
One benefit that’s come out is that state officials are now able to count the 285 communities in Shendam and 240 in Riyom.
A handful of communities have been “triggered” -35 in Shendam and 29 in Riyom – for community-led total sanitation, and their reactions still being watched as the project gets off the ground in its initial years.
The focus is simple: covering water, hand washing, using clean containers for drinking water, says Esther Adeyemi, WASH consultant after joining field workers in Tahoss, Ganawuri, Bum and Frangrol wards in Riyom council area.
“The focus is allowing the community to take action itself and push them to attain open-defecation free status.
“Teaching hasn’t really worked. We make them realize – that’s the way that works. They have to realize this themselves.”
What communities realize is how badly they need a hole in the ground.