Continuing the project with ASSCODECHA

On Friday we discussed with Amandio and Zeca about the continuation of our SGT project. I was curious how the discussions with Jaana some years back had gone and what kind of hopes they had of our project; would the dry sanitation be the way to go or did they wish we’d take another direction altogether.

Amandio and Zeca knew dry toilets as ecological latrines. First we talked about the space issue. ASSCODECHA works with the least fortunate families that have the least space. Some don’t even have space for a traditional latrine – they excrete in a plastic bag and throw that away somewhere. And even those who just have space for a latrine wouldn’t have space for a garden where they could utilize the compost. They did admit though that many people probably don’t know about space effective urban gardening techniques. They still had doubts about whether selling the compost or the produced vegetables would have a significant effect in their income. They also didn’t believe that dumping the sewage waste is a big issue here, but they did admit that when it floods after rain, people sometimes take advantage of that and open their latrine holes to empty them. The very reason for cholera epidemics here every summer. 

They also knew that in other neighborhoods there are a few NGOs working with dry sanitation and urban gardening. Those projects are still in implementing phase and so far they have only worked with families that already have areas for gardening, so they didn’t have much to say about that.

ASSCODECHA had previously worked with the World Food Program, where they gave out food. After that they thought that it’d be better to teach people to grow their own food and they had some discussions with organizations that have more experience on that, but they didn’t manage to start a cooperation and a project was never started. 

They said that they had nothing against a dry sanitation project, but believed it to be challenging. Zeca said that he had liked our idea about working with the schools. ASSCODECHA has a previous relationship eith the minucipality, and they could lobby for piloting dry toilets in a school that has a bad sanitation situation. Schools would also have space for proper gardens. If the children learned to use these latrines at school and ASSCODECHA would provide education material (simple contents, they reminded), it might be possible to create a demand for dry toilets. Therefore we agreed that we’ll continue research when we get back to Finland, and they can take our ideas forward with the municipality.

We made some posters with info about dry toilets and prepared a questionnaire to find out about people’s feelings towards them, but unfortunately the participants of our festival today were mainly children. We might have to leave the questionnaire for ASSCODECHA to do later in order to get more than a couple answers.