Interview with Jaana: dry sanitation

As we were going to present the dry toilet (huussi) solution combined with urban gardening as an example for the hackathon teams, on Wednesday we interviewed Jaana Oikarinen, who currently lives here and has been a volunteer for ASSCODECHA, but before that  worked in Swaziland with a dry sanitation project and wrote her thesis about the home gardens in Msunduza. The project was a cooperation between Huussi ry, the salvation army of Swaziland and the Mbabane municipality and was funded by the foreign ministry of Finland. The project included dry sanitation, organic gardening and environmental education.

When Jaana joined the project, it had already been going on for some years. What she saw was not a great success – some dry toilets were not ready or they were locked in public places. There were big administration problems and lack of education. People didn’t know how to use their dry toilets and used them as a storage instead. Jaana never saw any full toilets, so she couldn’t witness the composting and utilizing the product. She actually only saw one toilet in active use, and that belonged to a person who had a big garden and was very interested in the functioning mechanisms.

Interview with Jaana Oikarinen at ASSCODECHA

In the project they built three different kinds of dry toilets. One model was a ready package from a South-African company, and as people had not participated in the planning and building process they didn’t know how to use it. This model didn’t need any dry substance such as sawdust added after use due to some chemical that came with it. Instead it was very important to use toilet paper, which people didn’t as they couldn’t afford it. Probably they couldn’t afford to buy the additional chemical after a while either. The final project of this kind of toilet was supposed to be sand.  The other two toilets were built of local materials on the spot. In one case children got into the compost tank and broke the toilet.

Jaana thought that the internal communication with the project was not sufficient and that they should not have started with the building of the toilets. Instead people would’ve needed to be educated first and the demand should’ve been created. There had also been some talk about building a toilet of local scrap material, but that pilot was never realized. Jaana told that a similar dry sanitation project in Zambia had been more successful, mostly because it happened at a rural area instead of a slum.

Jaana had also discussed with the ASSCODECHA about trying out dry toilets here in Chamanculo. However they had thought that Chamanculo is too densily populated, and dry toilet, possible extra compost and garden need space. In Chamanculo people very rarely have a garden, whereas in Swaziland many people have gardens at home and schools have their own big gardens too, along with animals like chickens. Here some schools have small gardens, but it’s not possible to utilize them in teaching – the schools have too many children. So many, that they go to school in three turns. So here the transportation of compost could create problems. There might also be participation challenges, as people don’t really see the need to recycle energy, or anything else for that matter.

Jaana still thought that there would be possibilities of having school gardens, community gardens and home gardens, but people are probably not aware of space-efficient techniques like vertical gardens.  Here people don’t suffer too much hunger, but there is a lot of malnutrition due to diet consisting mainly of starch (bread, chips).  Around Chamanculo it’s easy to spot children with bloated stomachs.

In Jaana’s opinion schools might be better places to start with dry sanitation projects – many schools don’t have hygienic toilets, often due to lack of maintenance. She thought that ASSCODECHA should lobby for better maintenance. Often children don’t even want to go in the toilets.