What does it mean to have a toilet?

What does it mean to have a toilet? We in the West don’t spend much time pondering that question.

Geeta has no toilet near her home in northern India; she treks 2 miles in the dark to a field for privacy. If Vanessa’s school had private bathrooms, the 17-year-old wouldn’t have to miss class when she’s having her period.

In Ecuador, Reverside, 37, wouldn’t have to visit her brother’s house to use his toilet, which is shared by nine other people from different families.

These are some of the stories told (and shown) in a new exhibit called My Toilet: Global Stories from Women and Girls, put together by Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), a London-based nonprofit and the Panos Pictures photo agency to mark World Toilet Day. The six-day-long exhibit, which opened Monday at the Royal Opera Arcade Gallery in London, features images from 20 countries — Brazil to Kenya to the U.S. Each subject poses next to what she uses as a toilet and tells her story of why a latrine matters.

Among the 2.5 billion people without access to a clean and proper toilet — more than a billion of whom defecate out in the open — “women and girls are hit hardest,” Sam Drabble of WSUP says. That’s often the case in lower-income countries throughout South and Southeast Asia as well as sub-Saharan Africa.

A toilet may simply be a hole in the ground or a space in an open field. In some parts of South Asia, “hanging toilets” — bamboo huts with a hole cut out in the floor, suspended 3 feet above a pond — are common.

[NPR]

This entry was posted in Humanitarian Aid, International Cooperation by Grant Montgomery.