Composting Latrine with IOM

In January, myself, Health Committee President Atilio, and his brother Javier built a Composting Latrine through funds from a project with the International Organization for Migration.  The IOM is a UN Organization that has a 2-year project in the Comarca Emberá-Wounaan, Cemaco funded 100% by USAID.  The latrine was built as part of the Casa de Congreso Local, an office/meeting space.  Originally the IOM was going to build a Pit Latrine, but after my Health Promotion seminars the Dirigente (community leader) asked for a Composting Latrine.

At first, I wasn’t thrilled about the way the latrine was being introduced to the community.  In reality, this latrine won’t be used by any of the community members.  It is meant to be used by visitors when they come to the community.  The community and IOM were fine with this, but the idea bothered me.  Should we be prioritizing the sanitation needs of visitors to the community, or those who live there?

I stopped pressing for the latrine to go to a household, because that was simply not going to happen.  I realized that this could be turned into a useful step in terms of the community’s sanitation practice:

• The Dirigente asked IOM for a Composting Latrine, and would be able to do that with other organizations in the future.
•  I can train Atilio on how to build the latrine, who as Health Committee President can then train others.
•  People can see how the latrine is built, used, and maintained – even if only from observation

Atilio worked construction in Panamá City for 10 years, and is a very skilled worker.  Once I gave him the idea of what we wanted to build, he built it.  I only had to guide him on the basic design.  It was a lot of fun building together, and I learned a lot from him.  It also showed the community what they could do with the Peace Corps, if we work together.

Composting Latrine Project

November 30^th , 2011 was one of the most memorable days of my service.  This one day encompassed my desire to join the Peace Corps:  professional development work and personal adventures.  In the morning my Health Committee presented to the community a Composting Latrine project that we designed together, and in the afternoon we went hunting in the jungle.

The Committee members presented the idea of Composting Latrines (usage and maintenance), how they could improve health, and the benefit to their agricultural products.  They also presented a Work Plan, which is to solicit an agency for 4 latrines to be built at the Committee member’s homes.  Rules for participation were also given, and exactly what each family will contribute to the project.

The rules are:

1.  Attend 3 Health Talks
2.  Carry materials and participate in all work days to build latrines
3.  Sufficient wood to build the enclosure for the latrine, before construction begins
4.  Have 3 sacs of dry material to be used for composting, before construction beings.
5.  Each family pays $5 to the Treasurer, which they will receive in return if they participate in all days of work.  If they miss a day of work, they will not receive their $5, and in turn have to pay $10.

Family Contribution

To show the agencies that the community really wants latrines, each family is going to put down all the wood necessary to build the latrine, as well as manual labor.  Including materials and manual labor, each latrine costs about $500.

Peace Corps as a Bridge

The project is designed to solicit Panamanian Agencies with a long-term agenda for developing Composting Latrines.  I have given PowerPoint presentations on Composting Latrines to the PASAP, the Panamanian Minsitry of Health’s Water and Sanitation wing.  After the first 4 latrines are built, the Health Committee needs to give updates on the progress of the project.  Once those updates are given, the community and the agency can then work together on a bigger project.  Thus bridging the community and the agency, and removing Peace Corps from the process entirely.

Processes and Friendships

The goal is to take the Health Committee through the process of designing, soliciting, maintaining a Pilot Project of 4 latrines.  After the community sees how the latrine works, the Health Committee initiates the same process to solicit a bigger project.  This allows for a greater impact on health because the community will see their neighbors properly using a latrine, and hopefully follow.  For a community that is consistently handed out projects, this project will be one that they themselves initiated and executed.  Finally, it gives a sense of pride and ownership that they haven’t ever felt before.  Everybody loves accomplishing a challenge.

After the meeting my close friends Atilio and Misael were elated.  We looked at each other and said – “Let’s go hunting!”  We blast out on the Chucunaque River with rifles, machetes, and dogs.  As we are riding up river, they both said to me:  “Moises, I never thought that I would be up in front of my community presenting a project…”

Sitting there on the piragua, filing my machete, I had never felt more satisfied.

Health Committee Training

During November, I trained my Health Committee on Sanitation issues.  I found 5 community members who wanted to participate on the Committee, who will relay what we learned to the community, and start a pilot project.  I’ve been living in Alto Playón for a little over a year now, and I’m finally at the point where I have reliable people to work with me.   We started a group in December 2010, but it completely failed.  Nobody would show up to meetings, and weren’t really interested in working together.  I was able to find the right people by doing a Bucket Latrine presentation and Environmental Health Workshops.

The greatest part is that my host sister, Irasema Guainora, asked to join the committee the morning that we started the training.  She is really interested in composting latrines and I’m excited to have a woman on the committee.

WASH Index

I started off by teaching them about the WASH Index, which is a way to appraise the current Water and Sanitation situation.  After using the matrix to analyze the community, it was evident to the Committee that there was a lot of work to be done.  I also hope that this self-analysis will serve to have them view their community in a different way.  It also serves as a way to track the progress of the Sanitation situation in the community.

	MUCHO TRABAJO	HAY TRABAJO	NO TRABAJO	Fecha:	Fecha:	Fecha:
LETRINAS	No hay letrinas;  La gente usan el monte o el rio	Algunos tienen letrinas.  Son mantenidas mas o menos.	Todo de la comunidad tienen letrinas.  Son mantenidas buenas.
DRENAJE	No hay sistemas de drenaje.  Mucha agua estancada con cria de mosquitos.	Algunos tienen un sistema de drenaje.  Hay varios lugares con agua estancada.	Todos tienen sistemas de drenaje.  No hay agua estancada.
RESIDUOS SOLIDOS	No hay sistema de mantener residuos solidos.  Hay mucha basura en las calles.	Un sistema de mantener residuos solidos ha empezado.  Hay poquita basura en las calles.	La sistema de mantener residuos solidos esta funcionando.  No hay basura en la calle.
LAVA MANOS	No hay Tippy-Taps.	Algunos tienen y usan Tippy-Taps con jabon.	Todos tienen y usan Tippy-Taps con jabon.

Sanitation Topics

The training was based on 4 sanitation topics:

Drainage Systems

Solid Waste

Latrines

Hand Washing

For Drainage Systems, I spoke about making soak pits, which is essentially digging a hole in the ground and filling it with sand and medium sized rocks.  Having a soak pit below the washing area can remove standing water, which is a breeding ground for mosquitoes and smells awful. Although the ground water table is high in our community, the soak pit I have is working well.

Since Alto Playón is rural, the community needs to manage their own Solid Waste.  I first educated them on Reducing their trash and then Reusing their trash via composting and/or making useful things.  With all the rest of their waste, I introduced making an Incinerator out of metal tanks.  This way people can deposit their trash there, burn it in a single, high temperature location, and then bury the ash.  Burning trash is NOT an environmentally friendly option.  However, in our situation it will keep the community clean and reduce disease transmission via mosquitoes.

We then talked about Latrines.  I first covered disease transmission and how open defecation in the jungle and in the river is harmful to health.  Everyone on the Health Committee was essentially there because they are interested in Composting Latrines, and all of the previous promotion had paid off.

Finally, we covered the importance of Hand Washing, after using the bathroom, before eating, before preparing food, and the hands of the kids.  I introduced a Tippy-Tap which is a hanging gallon of water which allows them to wash their hands.

We covered each of the 4 topics in depth and I gave them a Pre-Test and a Post-Test.  They were most interested in working on Composting Latrines and we started to develop a Work Plan and a project to present to the community.

Designing a Project that WORKS

For the last few months I’ve been doing my best to design a Composting Latrine project with my community.  I have done a lot of Health Promotion and Bucket Latrine demonstrations in the past, which has raised consciousness of the community.  It has also helped me find my current Health Committee President, Atilio Guianora, who took a 3 day Project Management & Leadership course with me.

But how do I then translate a few educated and motivated people into developing infrastructure for an entire community, and continue to grow leaders?  If I were to follow the development norm in rural Panamá, I would solicit a big latrine project for everyone.  If I wanted to be a bit more strict, I could ask people to come to meetings and only those who came to meetings would then be part of the project.  That may work, but there are too many factors to make things go wrong:  people not showing up to work days, not viewing the project as their own but as “Peace Corps Project”, and the worst is that they might not even use the latrine.

I’m more interested in initiating a Community Action Cycle.  Designing a project that can be run by community members - first along with me on a small scale, and then independently on a larger scale. 

Initiating Behavior Change

In order to improve health, you’ve got to get people to change their behavior.  Placing infrastructure in front of them won’t do it.  Behavior change needs to come from within a few, and can come from the rest following a good example.  I thought it would be best to start with only a few latrines for those who chose to sit on a Health Committee.  I would train the Health Committee on Sanitation issues and how to design a project.  They would be the example for the community not only on how to build, maintain, and use the latrine, BUT how to participate in a community wide project.  When they see their neighbor using something new, they will hopefully be more interested in having their own

Making Things Exclusive

Why does Steve Jobs only release a limited amount of iPhones at first?  Exclusivity.  Release a few, intrigue the many. I am hoping that by only a few members having a composting latrine, the rest of the community will be interested in having one as well.  

Bucket Latrines

In an effort to promote composting latrines and for my own sanitation needs, I use something called a bucket latrine.  That's right - I take a sh!t in a bucket, and then compost it.

It's a very basic system actually.  I take a sh!t in a bucket and then I throw rice hulls on top of it to start the composting process and to remove the odor.  In fact, a variety of dry materials would work in order to compost human excreta; chopped grass or saw-dust do the trick just fine.   The miracle of composting lies in the fact that when human excreta is combined with these dry materials, the combination will kill the harmful pathogens that live in your poop.  Time, a critical mass, and a critical ratio of Carbon to Nitrogen in the mix (roughly 30:1) awakens thermophilic bacteria that heat up the pile and kill pathogens.  Once these pathogens are destroyed, the compost is ready to be used in the farm or the garden.

Every time the bucket is full, I go outside and dump it into my compost bin.  I asked community members to come and help me with a project one day, but didn't tell them it was the compost bin.  After we built the bin, I showed them what I intended to do with it by dumping my bucket in front of them.  To their surprise, disgust, and awe, they themselves saw that composting human excreta in fact doesn't smell.

By the end of my service, the bin should be full.  I have hopes that the next Peace Corps Volunteer that comes to my site will show the community how to utilize the compost.

Ecological Sanitation

Ecological sanitation is a system whereby human excreta (humanure) is composted to be re-used as a fertilizer.  What!? THAT'S GROSS!  Reuse my sh*t?!  But the sh*t that comes out of my body is full of harmful pathogens and well, smells like sh*t!  Yes, but there is more to your sh*t than you knew about.  Alongside the harmful pathogens live millions of productive micro-organisms that, under the right conditions, will kill the harmful pathogens which spread diseases.

For pathogen destruction to occur the excreta must be heated up to 140 F, or thermophilic conditions.  Thermophilic conditions are reached by creating a pile of a combination of human excreta with organic material such as grass clippings, rice hulls, or sawdust.   It takes at least one year for these conditions to arrive, therefore compost piles need to sit untouched.  Remarkably, the organic material removes odors and repels flies and mosquitos.

Furthermore, humanure composting is part of the food cycle.

Appropriate technology.

Our community sits on a river bank and has a high water table, which means if you dig more than 2 feet you will find water.  This rules out pit latrines because the pit stays wet, gets full of maggots, smells horrible, and attracts mosquitos.  These mosquitos are vectors for disease transmission as they fly around the community after having touched human excreta.  People in my community, especially women, hate pit latrines for the smell and therefore either use the river or go out into the jungle.

A composting latrine is built above ground and thus avoids reaching the water table.  It is designed to have 2 chambers with a special seat above the chambers that allows the excreta to fall below and also separates urine.  Urine is separated in order to keep the pile at around 50% moisture content.  A wet environment doesn't allow for the pile to reach thermophilic conditions.  After each use the user throws dry material into the chamber.  Start by using one chamber for a year or until it is full, then start using the second chamber.  Leave the organic material in the first chamber to compost for at least one year.  Remove the humanure, dry it out under the sun, and then plant some banana trees!

21st Century technology?

Would you take 2 valuable resources, combine them, to then render both of them as useless?  If I gave you 3 gallons of water and fertilizer would you throw them away?  Unfortunately, our 'modern' sanitation system does exactly that.  Every time we flush the toilet, we combine human excreta and 3 gallons of water to render them both useless.  YES I am classifying human excreta not as waste but as a resource.

As volunteers in the field we come up against the cultural / custom battle of how human excreta is perceived all the time in rural communities.  However, this battle would be x100000 times harder in the Western world, which can be for the most part considered to be fecophobic.  Eastern cultures have been embracing humanure composting for centuries, as they see it as part of an ecological cycle.  In fact, in South Korea humanure has been known to be sold on the black market!

Our current sanitation system does work from a public health standpoint.  However, it is also consumes are amounts of resources and is completely dependent on the grid.  In order for your excreta to move from your house or apartment to waste management facility requires a system that uses a lot of water and a lot of electricity.  Humanure composting uses neither water or electricity.  Could humanure composting be scaled up to someday make an impact on the global warming challenges we face?

Environmental Health Workshops

Participatory Analysis such as Community Mapping, Health Calendar, and a SWOT analysis were used as information gathering tools.  Development practitioners use this information to then design educational seminars, projects, and initiatives in the community.  I used our analysis to design 3 half-day participatory Environmental Health Workshops, one of which was conducted with the Panamanian Red Cross.  The activities in the workshop came from the UN & World Health Organization's PHAST Guide for Health Promotion.

The EH Workshops had 3 goals:

• Analyze the community's current health practices.
• Connect drinking water and lack of sanitation to diarrheal diseases cited on the Health Calendar.
• Provide multiple sanitation options and analytically select the appropriate solution. 

I started with an activity called 3-Pile Sorting where members were given cards with drawings of with a range of good and bad health practices I observed in the community:  from washing hands with soap before eating to defecating in the river, from using a composting latrine to throwing garbage in the river.  In groups they have a discussion to sort the cards under Good for Health, Okay for Health, and Bad for Health. 

As they presented the Bad for Health practices cards, I showed them how those practices brought about the diarrhea and vomiting they cited on their Health Calendar.  This image of how open defecation connects to ingesting feces brought one person in the room to gag.

I then asked how the Good for Health cards could cut these disease vectors.  Latrines and hand washing came up as the solutions.

What kind of latrine is best for Alto Playón?  I asked the community list characteristics of what they want in a latrine:

• No smell
• No flies
• Proximity & Safety
• Private
• Maintenance
• Cost

We then tested their chosen characteristics against a pit latrine, a composting latrine, and a septic system. The pit lost because it smells horrible and attracts mosquitos.  The septic system is far too expensive and unfeasible for a rural community with no running water.  In every workshop the Composting Latrine won!  

The workshops were a success.  In a participatory manner the community not only took a look at their current water and sanitation practices, but also together picked the solution.  This lays the ground work for further education on composting latrines and the formation of a functioning Health Committee.