Recently, I just got back from a week-long trip to the East and Adamaoua regions. I went to supervise and help out with the implementation of a process called Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS). In the past I had done an evaluation trip to check out villages that had already gone through CLTS and see if the approach was working and community members were still involved in the processes. This trip, though, was more focused on actually setting up the process in new villages. Well actually I started the trip in the East to celebrate with villages that had accomplished open-defecation free (ODF) status and then went on to trigger new villages in the Adamaoua.
Maybe using all these terms is a bit confusing, so let me explain CLTS a bit. CLTS is an approach used to push (or trigger) villages into taking responsibility for their own sanitation. It works using innate responses such as shame and guilt to trigger community members to take action out of disgust for the sanitation situation in their village. Obviously it does not work in all villages, but in smaller villages where there have not been previous hard ware subsidies for sanitation projects, the villagers may become motivated to build their own latrines and do what they can at their level with their own means to make a positive change to stop the faecal oral route. They build latrines and set up community sanitation initiatives to clean up the environment over the course of several months after which they can achieve ODF status. Once it is achieved, a celebration takes place and a sign is made to let other villages know that open defecation is not permitted there.
So now more specifically about my trip: it started in the East with ODF celebrations. While these were fun, they were not the heart of the process and at times it felt like it was more about the food and the soap that UNICEF was giving than it was about the actual achievement of ending open defecation. I went to two, both right around a town called Garoua Boulai, which is on the border with the Central African Republic. I liked the East a lot and while in Garoua Boulai, I stayed at a small guest house run by a Christian parish. It was very quaint and cute.
Next I continued on the road to the Adamaoua to work with another central team working on triggering villages. This was a much more complicated process. Activities took 4 days because we started the first day with a conference to train department level people to implement the process. Then the next two days we split everyone into 2 teams and each team visited 3 villages a day. So by the end we had triggered 12 villages. Then the final day we asked the locally formed monitoring committees to come to the department setting to present action plans and we showed them how they would do monitoring and evaluation in their respective villages.
In each village we would start by introducing ourselves and having the community draw a map of their village in the dirt. They would label public places such as schools, churches, mosques, and water points with small pieces of paper. Then everyone would get up and label their house. After this we would ask everyone to label where they defecate. At times it was difficult because people do not want to admit they don’t have a latrine. In one village things got blocked because the chief made a statement that everyone had latrines and no one was defecating in the open. After that no one could challenge the words of the chief. Activities went best if the chief was very open and honest about this topic. Some people have latrines, but others did not and so we wanted them to identify where they were doing their business. Then we would go on a walk to the places where open defecation was happening. Usually a young child would lead us to the spots because they were the mostly likely to disregard the cultural norms of not talking about defecation. We would bring back a ‘sample’ to the community gathering. This is where the shame and disgust started to kick in. People would look away and generally act uncomfortable. Using this ‘sample’ and nearby mud/rocks we would do a calculation of how much one family produces over a day, then two days, then a week. Then we would estimate what that means for a village of 10 families or 100. In this way people realized that it is actually a problem that needs to be dealt with.
After this calculation we would do a demonstration using bottled water and a glass. We would ask who wanted water and several people would raise their hand (of those who were not fasting for Ramadan). We would give water to all those who wanted it. Then we would take a small piece of straw and touch the poop sample with it and then dip it into a new glass of water. This demonstrated that even though you could not see the germs, they could still be in the water. No one would drink this water even though it looked the same as all the glasses before it. At this point the community would become very emotional. The connection had been made that they were in fact eating each other’s sh*t. We would then lead a short calculation of medical expenses due to faecal-oral transmitted diseases. Some people would become very adamant that this needed to stop in their village. And a few volunteers would come forward to form a local monitoring committee to ensure the sanitation of their villages.
I really enjoyed these triggering processes and found that everything went more smoothly when the implementation team sat amongst the villagers instead of creating a separation. Women would be whispering to me on the side during the events, making jokes about how much poop it was or just showing their disgust. Everyone was freer in this manner and less formal, thus people were more involved.
